Innovation Economy: Student Loan Advice - Simple Tuition CEO Kevin Walker offers advice on navigating the current student loan market, including PLUS loans and peer-to-peer lending.
Boston Globe:
Chaos and confusion can create great conditions for a start-up. Or they can kill it.
That’s what makes entrepreneurship so much fun.
As summer approaches, millions of students and parents will begin hunting for the loans that will help cover their college tuition bills. What they’ll likely find is less choice, since more than 50 lenders have ducked out of the market for federally backed student loans in recent months. And issuers of private loans are expected to be more stringent on credit scores, while ratcheting up interest rates.
That may influence parents and students to spend more time shopping for loans. And that situation, which is part of the global credit drought, could prove to be a cool drink of water for companies trying to build businesses around connecting students with money for their education.
‘As a start-up, you either have to figure out how to change the world, or wait for things to happen organically,’ says Kevin Walker, cofounder and chief executive of Newton-based Simple Tuition Inc., an online service that helps students compare various loan options. The growing challenge of piecing together college financing, Walker believes, could help accelerate that organic change.
In 2005, when Walker was laying the groundwork for his company, the idea of parents or students doing much comparison shopping - or of schools encouraging it - was not particularly welcomed.
‘Families would simply go through the school’s financial aid office,’ says Walker. ‘We’d explain what we were doing, and we were told, ‘That’s not the way things work.’
Lenders especially didn’t want their loans to be easily comparable - as companies like LendingTree had done with home mortgages and car loans. ‘That would put them in a whole new world of competition,’ Walker says.
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[…] create great conditions for a start-up. Or they can kill it. Thats what makes entrepre source: Student Loan Confusion Opens Market Niche, Virtual Entrepreneur - Business Opportunities, Links And News For Small Businesses And […]