When a borrower takes out a federal student loan, they rarely deal with just one company. Over the life of that loan, their account can pass through the hands of a dozen or more servicers and debt collectors—each handoff creates a fresh opportunity for payments to be misapplied, paperwork to be lost, and borrowers to be bounced from one party to the next with no one accountable for the outcome. These companies are not minor players: collectively, they have received more than $10 billion to manage the federal loan portfolio, even as borrowers are left to navigate subpar service and absorb the cost of the system’s failures.
This report from Protect Borrowers and the Debt Collection Lab at Princeton University maps that fragmented system: who the players are, how borrowers’ loans move between them, and why the resulting breakdowns are not isolated errors but the predictable product of how the system is built. Understanding this fragmentation is the first step toward fixing it.
Read the Report: Repeat Offenders: The Student Loan Servicers Who Keep Getting Paid to Fail Borrowers
View the Fact Sheets Here.
Read the Press Release: New Report Shows Trump’s Deadline Will Thrust Millions of Student Loan Borrowers into Broken and Corrupt Servicing System
Read the Related Blog: The Student Loan Companies Driving the System Today
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Fact Sheets: