Enhancements Boost Usage of Meteor Network

The Meteor Advisory Team recently announced increased usage of the Meteor Network for 2006. The team credits the increased usage with recent enhancements that include:

• Access to Meteor data for financial-aid professionals, education-lender professionals, borrowers, and customer-service representatives working on behalf of lenders or servicers.
• An announcement from the Office of Federal Student Aid that institutions can rely on information that they access directly from a loan holder’s authoritative database. This includes third-party Web-based products, like Meteor, that display a loan holder’s real-time data. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to access the announcement.
• Ability for Meteor to populate loan-counseling results in the Mapping Your Future online exit-counseling tool and the upcoming release of the exit-counseling tool, USA Funds^® Student Loan Transition Guide.

The Meteor Project is a collaborative student-loan-industry effort coordinated through National Council of Higher Education Loan Programs to retrieve and aggregate student-financial-award information for both financial-aid professionals and borrowers. To achieve this goal, the Meteor Project created an open-source, freely available software application.

For more information about how the Meteor Project can benefit your school, please visit the NCHELP Web site. Or, contact Brian Allison, USA Funds director, technology initiatives, and Meteor Project steering-committee member.