There are very few lenders offering private (also known as "alternative") educational loans right now. Most of these lenders are the very well-known major banks, including Wells Fargo, Chase, Discover and Sallie Mae.

The message really hasn’t filtered down to students yet, but it’s a very different borrowing environment today than it was just a few years ago. A lot of parents and cousins, and older brothers and sisters, borrowed liberally from educational specialty lenders like Astrive, Campus Door, Next Student, and My Rich Uncle. All of those companies have shut down.

It is almost a certainty that you will need to provide a very high creditworthy cosigner in order to be approved for a private educational loan of any amount. The days when lenders would agree to lend ten, or twenty or thirty thousand dollars to applicants with no income, no assets, and little or no credit history are behind us, at least for the moment – so today’s applicants need a co-applicant who does have good income and does have a significant and positive credit history.

With so few lenders making these loans, you won’t find a tremendous amount of difference in the terms and conditions – the key will be the variable interest rate that you qualify for. Again, that will be primarily determined by the credit of your cosigner.

You can apply for a loan with more than one of these companies, simultaneously, and comparison shop their offers. I suppose your school gave you a list of "preferred lenders", or you can visit a website like http://www.bankrate.com in order to compare rates. (Bankrate tracks interest rates amongst the major lenders).

Search for any of these lenders, and you’ll find lots of complaints – I guarantee you that 99% of those complaints will be from borrowers who ran afoul of their lender, and experienced the vigor with which all student loan lenders will pursue borrowers who fall behind on their repayment obligations. If you are going to borrow for school, you MUST take the responsibility to track your borrowing, and know what it’s going to cost you to repay the loans. I can warn you, right now, that student loan debt – more than any other debt except possibly IRS debt – is debt that you can not escape. It is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Students who convince themselves that they’ll just have to ‘borrow whatever it takes to make it through school" and worry about it later almost always find themselves in a horrible financial mess.

Good luck to you. I hope this information helped.
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