Frequently Asked Questions

The National Student Clearinghouse is an industry-sponsored consortium that was established to proactively enhance the overall student loan program and simplify enrollment verification. Participating guarantors, lenders, and servicers underwrite its operating costs. There is no charge to schools for participation.

The Clearinghouse is a non-profit organization with an elected Board of Directors, comprised of members from NASFAA, AACRAO, COHEO, Sallie Mae, NCHELP (guarantors), CBA (banks), EFC (secondary markets), and SLSA (servicers).

Once your institution signs our participation agreement, the Clearinghouse becomes your agent for confirming the enrollment status of your student financial aid recipients. Periodically, you need to report the enrollment status for all your students to the Clearinghouse via secure FTP. The Clearinghouse, in turn, provides status and deferment information, on your behalf, to guaranty agencies, lenders, servicers, and the Department of Education's NSLDS (National Student Loan Data System).

The Clearinghouse process identifies borrowers who:

• Withdraw from school and need to begin repayment
• Transfer from one school to another
• Return to school and may be eligible for a deferment
• Continue in school and are eligible for deferment extension

Enrollment verification and deferment is confusing for borrowers, burdensome and expensive for schools, and a source of avoidable default claims for the government. Status verification is problematic primarily because the process is fragmented among so many schools, guarantors, lenders, loan servicing companies, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Under the current process, schools are required to:

• Accept and edit SSCRs containing lists of every financial aid student at the institution and report all discrepancies.  At least once each academic term, you must compare your enrollment records with the government's borrower records, make the appropriate adjustments to the government's files and return them within 30 days of receipt.
• Respond to large volumes of paper-based lender status and deferment requests, on a borrower-by-borrower basis.
• Report all individual borrower dropouts — within 30 days — to the appropriate holder. (Often the school cannot identify the holder of the student's loan.)
• Use multiple non-standard communication processes. The NSLDS and each lender, loan servicing company, or other financial aid provider has its own formatting and reporting procedures.

The current cumbersome process is also slow. By the time the NSLDS reports to the school, the school reports back to the NSLDS, the NSLDS reports to the guarantors, and the guarantors report to the lenders, information is outdated. Subsequently, schools are often asked to provide student status updates directly to loan holders. This leads to duplicate information being provided to multiple parties, requiring extensive effort by schools, guarantors, and holders to sort out the "most correct" status of a borrower.

Schools:

• Simplify verification: Report periodically to only one entity using a standard format
• Delegate the responsibility for responding to all SSCRs and deferment requests
• Avoid the expense involved in writing software programs or performing manual look-ups to edit reports generated by others
• Reduce cohort default rates by providing accurate, automated, frequent enrollment updates to lenders

Students:

• Avoid inappropriate lender collection efforts during in-school and deferment periods
• Obtain in-school deferments promptly

Some students may have received student loans at a previous institution before transferring to your institution without receiving a new student loan. If you reported enrollment data only on students who receive student loans at your institution, the Clearinghouse would be unable to correctly report to guarantors and lenders that the transfer-in student borrower was enrolled and eligible for loan deferment. Additionally, it is operationally simpler for most schools to report on all students.

Yes. The US Department of Education has stated that a school's release of personally identifiable information from student education records to the Clearinghouse does not violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Their letter is available upon request.

Your contract with the Clearinghouse allows us to share personally identifiable enrollment data only with stipulated authorized entities, including a student's lender, servicer, guarantor, the U.S. Department of Education, or the student's former school for compliance with the Student Right to Know Act. Acting as each participating school's contractual agent, the Clearinghouse ensures that enrollment information is shared only with student loan providers or other legitimate entities by enforcing the following operational procedures:

• Only schools and student loan providers (guarantors, lenders and servicers) and other authorized entities are can participate in the Clearinghouse.
• Schools and student loan providers must sign a contract warranting that they will seek status information only on former students (if they are a school) or borrowers (if they are a loan provider).

Schools and student loan providers commit, in their Clearinghouse contract, to request data only for students whose enrollment data they have a right to know in carrying out their responsibilities under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, the Student Right to Know Act, and other authorized purposes.

Timing and frequency of enrollment reporting vary from school to school and depend on each school's calendar, clock methodology (clock hours, semester, trimester) and break periods. We recommend that semester schools generate a report four times during the term:

• Census date
• Every 30-45 days (subsequent-of-term)
• Term end

Contact your Clearinghouse representative for guidance in developing a reporting schedule tailored to the your school's needs.

The Clearinghouse has made the maintenance of historical information and audit trails a key priority.

Upon request, we will provide:

• History, by participating school, of all status records submitted to the Clearinghouse
• History, by participating school, of status and deferment information requests by lenders and guarantors as well as our response to those requests
• History, by student, of all status updates received from schools and reports to lenders and guarantors

Access to enrollment information and notification histories is available to participating schools, guarantors, and servicers via the secure portion of this Web site.

• Be sure you have the consensus of all pertinent school personnel to proceed with the Clearinghouse effort.
• Call your Clearinghouse representative to discuss start-up and implementation procedures and an implementation schedule.
• Identify and commit the resources to develop and test the necessary programs for providing periodic enrollment data to the Clearinghouse (the Clearinghouse will provide you with the technical guidelines). Once you notify us that you are ready to begin programming, our representatives will work with your programming staff to answer questions and support them through the programming and testing process.
• Sign and return the Clearinghouse participation agreement, which appoints the Clearinghouse as your school's agent for purposes of confirming the enrollment status of student financial aid recipients.
• Once testing is complete, live operations will begin on a date agreed upon by your school and the Clearinghouse.

Once you join the Clearinghouse, you will receive a password to access our secure site, from which you can instantly confirm the enrollment information you have sent us. You can also verify that the Clearinghouse has notified lenders, guarantors and the NSLDS of a student's enrollment status, including the dates that the Clearinghouse processed deferment forms. In addition, you can review your submission processing status and schedules.

Yes. Our StudentTracker service provides electronic access to a database containing more than 80 million current and historical enrollment records for post-secondary students. More than 3,200 colleges, enrolling 91% of US college students, participate in the Clearinghouse, are represented. Participating institutions continually update the database by providing periodic reports of all of their enrolled students. Your authorized personnel can search this database to identify or confirm a student's enrollment at other institutions before, during, and subsequent to the student's attendance at your own school.

If you have further questions, please contact the Clearinghouse
at 703-742-4200 or service@studentclearinghouse.org.