Neither Ripon College nor any employee of the Office of Financial Aid has received, or will ever knowingly accept, any financial incentive from any of our “preferred” lending partners to promote one student loan product over another. Our preferred lender list, for both the federal Stafford loan program and the private educational loan program, was established after an open request for information process conducted by our Office of Financial Aid and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. The goal was to establish which student loan providers offered the most competitive borrower benefits, ultimately reducing the cost to our student borrowers, and to maintain the highest level of customer service to ensure accurate and timely information. In every case, student borrowers at Ripon have the ultimate say as to which student loan provider they use to help finance their education.

Our mission in the Office of Financial Aid is to provide our students and their families with a professional and ethical approach to making the dream of a Ripon education a reality. There are two key objectives for our office:

1. To help students attain a Ripon education by providing as much student aid as is available from all sources of federal and state assistance, private scholarships offered chiefly by the college and outside organizations, and student loans.
2. To keep student-loan debt burden as low as possible.

We will continue to work to ensure that students and their families have access to as much information as possible, from as many different sources as possible, so that they can best determine how to fulfill their needs.