Goodbye to Nelnet’s Consolidations Department
As of May 17th, 2024, Nelnet is no longer processing Federal Direct student loan consolidation applications in-house.
As a result of this recent change, Nelnet has been removed as one of the consolidation loan servicers that a borrower could select during the consolidation application online at studentaid.gov temporarily.
As of now, only Edfinancial, Aidvantage and Mohela remain as the loan servicer options.
Nelnet will reappear as an option for Direct Consolidation Loan servicing in the future. However, they will *not* be processing the application request as they did in the past. Instead, this responsibility will be passed on to Aidvantage, the same loan servicer that presently processes consolidations for the other 3 Direct Loan servicers:
- Aidvantage
- EdFinancial
- Mohela
So, Aidvantage will be the only loan servicer processing consolidations for all 4 federal student loan servicers going forward.
Double Consolidation Loophole Lives On
The other consolidation-related update for today is:
You can still process a Parent Plus Double Consolidation and get into the SAVE repayment assistance program, even though Aidvantage will be the only consolidation processor.
Now that the Parent Plus loan coding has been updated on studentaid.gov, you’re not fooling the consolidation department when choosing different loan servicers either way.
However, the same regulation change that is closing this loophole in July of 2025 also states directly that they will still allow the SAVE program to be processed until July 2025 on Double Consolidation loans. What they didn’t promise is that they’d make it easy!
I recommend, when attempting to use this loophole, to continue the same Double Consolidation process with multiple loan servicers and make sure that the final consolidating loan servicer is different from the original. The loan servicer for the final consolidation loan will then approve the SAVE application, even though even though all the processing was executed by Aidvantage.
That’s all for today. If you have any questions on the Double Consolidation Loophole, SAVE or Nelnet’s consolidation processing changes – please click here to set up a call at your convenience.