USA Funds Loan Counseling Tool Gives Student Confidence
Editor’s Note: The following is a feature from the USA Funds® 2007 annual report. USA Funds Education Access Report is highlighting the students featured in the annual report to show how USA Funds is getting results for students. To access the full report online, you’ll need Adobe Reader.
When Whitney Dale took part in entrance counseling as a first-time Federal Stafford loan borrower, she felt confident about the process. After all, she’d received training on the online counseling tool that her school, Prairie View A&M University, uses to administer the counseling to students.
Dale’s entrance counseling taught her plenty about her rights and responsibilities as the borrower of a federal education loan.
Dale, 20, has been a student-worker in the Prairie View, Texas, school’s financial aid office since March. As an employee, she’d learned how to assist students as they completed counseling through USA Funds Loan Counselor®. But last fall was the first time the junior marketing major experienced USA Funds Loan Counselor as a borrower.
She took part in counseling through USA Funds Stafford Loan GuideSM, the entrance counseling component of USA Funds Loan Counselor.
“Going through the counseling as a student gave me everything I thought it would — and more,” Dale says. “It taught me about handling debt, interest rates and calculating student loan payments, and it broke down and explained every aspect in a way that made it easy to understand and remember.”
USA Funds Loan Counselor is a suite of products that helps schools fulfill all federal requirements for loan counseling and simplifies Stafford-loan entrance and exit counseling with one online program. Since USA Funds Loan Counselor’s introduction in 2006, more than 125 schools nationwide have implemented the tool.
Eighty-five schools offer USA Funds Stafford Loan Guide to their students. And students at more than 100 schools undergo exit counseling through USA Funds Student Loan Transition GuideSM, the exit counseling component of USA Funds Loan Counselor launched in 2007. USA Funds Loan Counselor recorded nearly 27,000 sessions of students using the tool for entrance and exit counseling in 2007 alone.
Prairie View A&M, one of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, implemented USA Funds Loan Counselor just under a year ago and offers both entrance and exit counseling through the tool. Carlos Clark, assistant provost in the school’s Office of Student Financial Aid, says thousands of Prairie View A&M’s students have been through counseling on USA Funds Loan Counselor, noting that more than 80 percent of the university’s 8,300 students receive financial aid for college.
Prior to 2007-2008, Dale had received forms of college financial aid other than loans — including grants and the Federal Work-Study funds that help pay her wages in the financial aid office. But she knows her first education loan likely won’t be her last, especially since she plans to pursue a master’s degree in marketing or business administration after she completes her bachelor’s degree work in 2009.
Ultimately she hopes to open her own sports and entertainment marketing firm.
“Going to college is expensive,” Dale says. “It’s important to be able to budget money so you won’t have to take out unnecessary loans. But with all I’ve learned through USA Funds Loan Counselor, I know I will be able to pay my loans back.”