There are several types of loans available to students. The simplest categorization is into federal student loans and private loans. Federally funded loans are administered initially through the US Department of Education's Federal Student Aid programs, and are usually the easiest to get student loan consolidation services for. These federal programs disburse about $60 billion a year in loans, work-study support and grants. Stafford loans are the most common form of federal loans for students, but there are a variety of other federal payment plans - among them military / ROTC plans to pay for college.
Private student loans are administered by standard lending institutions. Among the most common are Citibank student loans and the Sallie Mae Signature student loans. These lenders are basically providing unsecured (or in some cases secured) loans to you as a student, and will most often charge higher interest rates than their federal counterparts.
Private and federal loans, along with scholarships, can be combined to fund your education. However, it's important that when it comes time to consolidate student loans, you do not mix the two types together. You should always consolidate your federal loans first, then separately consolidate private student loan debt. The benefits of consolidating your federal loans include: a lower interest rate (usually, but keep in mind that interest rates change every July 1), increasing the time for loan repayment to 30 years which reduces your monthly costs, and reducing the number of lending institutions you send checks to every month. For a more complete discussion of this topic and consolidation eligibility criteria, visit our page on how to consolidate student loans. Medical student loans fall into a special class, and are discussed on our medical school loans page.
Consolidation loans have longer terms than other loans. Debtors can choose terms of 10–30 years. Although the monthly repayments are lower, the total amount paid over the term of the loan is higher than would be paid with other loans. The fixed interest rate is calculated as the weighted average of the interest rates of the loans being consolidated, assigning relative weights according to the amounts borrowed, rounded up to the nearest 0.125%, and capped at 8.25%. Some features of the original consolidated loans, such as postgraduation grace periods and special forgiveness circumstances, are not carried over into the consolidation loan, and consolidation loans are not universally suitable for all debtors.
The Federal Loan Consolidation Program was created in 1986. In 1998, the United States Congress changed the interest rate to the aforementioned fixed rate weighted mean, effective February 1, 1999. Consolidation loans taken out before that date had a variable interest rate, determined by the individual FDLP loan origination center (e.g., in the case of a university, that university) or FFELP lender (e.g., a third party bank).[3][4]
In 2005, the Government Accountability Office considered consolidating consolidation loans so that they were exclusively managed through the FDLP. Based on several assumptions about future variations in interest rates, the loan volume, the percentage of defaulters, cost estimates from the United States Department of Education, it concluded that while doing so would incur an additional cost of $46 million, caused by the higher administrative costs of the FDLP compared to the FFELP, this would be offset by a $3,100 million saving comprised in part of avoiding $2,500 million in subsidy costs.[1] In 2008, turmoil in the financial and credit markets has led to the suspension of many loan consolidation programs, including Sallie Mae, Nelnet and Next Student.
