Repaying educational loans can be a significant challenge for alumni. How you handle your repayment reponsibilities can greatly impact your credit rating. Defaulting on student loans can make it very difficult for you to make major purchases such as a car or a home. Conversely, reponsible repayment habits can help you to build an excellent credit history. For these reasons, we urge you to take your student loan repayment responsibilities seriously.

The first step for alumni is to determine exactly how much student loan debt you have accumulated and to whom you will be making payments. You can use our Loan Locator tab to help you with this process.

An important second step is to estimate your total monthly repayment amount for all of your student loans. The College Board provides an excellent online calculator for you to use to compute your estimated total payments. Be sure to keep in mind that you may be making two or more separate payments to different loan agencies each month.

You may want to consider a Federal Consolidation Loan in order to simplify repayment of multiple loans and to extend your repayment term. However, we recommend that you carefully consider both the advantages and disadvantages of a consolidation loan before making this decision. Our Loan Consolidation tab provides a detailed description of issues that you should consider.