IPFW Chosen For Loan Counseling Study
(Image courtesy of IPFW)
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIPFW has been selected as an experimental site for the U.S. Department of Education’s Loan Counseling Initiative. The university is one of 51 institutions taking part in the initiative, which aims to test the effectiveness of requiring loan counseling for students more often than what is required by law.
Currently, colleges and universities are statutorily required to provide one-time entrance and one-time exit counseling, according to IPFW. The university is the only Indiana institution chosen for the initiative, which will also test various counseling tools and approaches.
"We’re looking forward to providing students information that will improve their understanding of their student loan debt," said David Peterson, director of financial aid. "We see the Loan Counseling Initiative as another opportunity to educate our students on how to better manage their student loans."
About 100,000 students throughout the country will participate in the study, which the Department of Education says will continue for several years. Half of the students will receive additional loan counseling and the other half will receive the current required entrance and exit counseling in an effort to see if the additional counseling will improve students’ decision-making on how much to borrow, promotes successful repayment of student loans and has an impact on academic performance.
IPFW did not state whether the recent approval to realign the university into two distinct institutions, will play a factor in its participation in the initiative.