ACS Student Loans

How do ACS student loans work? Attending college can be a costly adventure with the ever rising cost of tuition and school supplies. Some students may not realize that they have options available to them. One of the first places that you should look into would be the financial aid department at your college. They can go over such loans as the ACS Student Loan with you. ACS stands for Affiliated Computer Services. ACS is a company which specializes in technology outsourcing solutions and business processing outsourcing. They have offered outsourcing solutions to over 1000 colleges as well as universities, which makes them the largest lender in the country. They have over 8.7 million borrowers that have outstanding loans with them.

ACS processes student loans by business process outsourcing. Because they are so efficient with processing and storing college loan information, they have been awarded a contract from the US government to handle a portion of the federal student loan program. If you check out the ACS website, you would find out they are a Fortune 500 company and they employ over 40,000 people in 100 countries all over the world. There are also many legislators that are trying to get a law passed that would keep those jobs in the United States but for now ACS will be the ones that will process and grant student loans.

If you are not familiar with the student loan process with ACS then here is a brief breakdown to help you get a better understanding of how it all works. The first thing that you would need to do is complete a federal student loans application which is also known as an FAFSA. You’ll find this loan application in places such as the financial aid office at your college or even local high school. Once you have filled out this application ACS can help you apply for both PLUS and Stafford loans online. Once you’ve completed the FAF SA application and send it in, you will get a response back in approximately four weeks. The response is called the student aid report or an SAR. This report gives you all of the FAFSA information as well as what your expected family contribution will be.

The report will also be sent to universities and colleges that you’ve listed on your FAFSA form. The financial aid offices at these institutions can then develop an award letter which would outline any direct aid and loan information that they can offer you. Once you have all of this completed, FAF SA application, student aid report and the award letter, then the ACS Student Loan process can begin. ACS student loan offerings come in three different loan types which deal with students and college loans. Each type targets a different type of borrower or end-user which would include universities and colleges, financial institutions and student or parent borrowers.

ACS University/College offerings
It pretty much works the same way with ACS for university and college offerings as it does when the ACS provides outsourcing for the US government student loan programs. One of the core strengths is that colleges are there to offer students a top quality education. Colleges and universities can focus more on giving their students the education they deserve by outsourcing to ACS the nonstrategic services. They can provide accessible servicing of the student loans as well as basic information. This can be done on the Internet with the use of website tools once you have registered and created a user account.

ACS for Parents/Students
From online you can access express pay to help manage payments for your loan as well as account management services where you can check on your balance, payment history and even your student loan interest rates. You will also have access for a student loan deferments, economic hardship deferments or even forbearance if you find you’re having trouble making the loan payments.

ACS for Financial Institutions
ACS is looked at as a partner not a competitor where financial institutions are concerned. This is because they do not lend money directly to the students. What they do is concentrate on partnering with the lending institutions to help provide servicing for loans for students.

ACS offers technology for lenders such as web-based self-service. This will work for both students and financial aid offices. Even lenders can have access to the same web-based self-service programs. ACS can help from start to finish, with lending needs for parents and students with such things as online student loan payments, deferment and forbearance requests, updating account information, loan payment processing and scheduling of payments in real time access to your loan information. So you see this is a very good option for any students to look into.