ACS Education Service |
| United States, New York |
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Consumer reviews about ACS Education Service |
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lmsmith55
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Mar 14, 2012
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Poor Customer Service/support
I recently became aware that ACS has taken over the handling of Direct Student Loan Repayments, something I thought was administered by the Federal Government. As of this past fall, the Direct Loan Servicing website was changed and all organization and proper processing of student loans seemed to fall by the wayside. I have been in repayment for 3 years and never had a problem until now. Their customer service staff is uninformed and instead of helping borrowers is actually forcing them into temporary forbearance because of misinformation and very slow processing times. I have been trying to get things straightened out for a month now and finally decided to write to my representatives and the Department of Education in Washington. These are government loans and should not be handled the same way private loans are. This is not helping anyone and may force many unsuspecting people into defaulting on their loans.
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Lisa Featherston
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Mar 15, 2012
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Poor Customer Service/support
Oh man... can you tell me where or how you came by finding out that ACS is handling (all I assume by your posted statement) the Direct Student Loans? The Department of Education's website states, "The Four federal loan servicers - FedLoan Servicing (PHEAA), Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc., Nelnet, and Sallie Mae. And according to what they are telling me, Nelnet is the go to guy before all others. If ACS is calling the shots, I definitely need to know that.
Thankfully I am eligible for the Special Loan Consolidation Program and based on the criteria, my student loan(s) from ACS will be taken out of their hands and consolidated with the others. It would be my luck that once the consolidation is complete, the Government (who will then be the guarantor) will have put ACS in charge of their repayments. I actually would much rather it be Nelnet quite frankly.
But if ACS is really "the one"... please let me know how to verify that information for my own preparations. Thanks for the heads up.
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lmsmith55
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Mar 15, 2012
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Poor Customer Service/support
If you go to www.myedaccount.com to manage your loan repayment and place that link in your favorites list, it will be listed as Acs - Manage My Account - Login. After having done a little research on the web, I found information to confirm this. This is the official Direct Loan Repayment account site and it is being managed by Acs. Once you are done with school and have consolidated your loans and are in repayment after the 6 month grace period, this is who you will be dealing with. Something needs to be done; these people are incompetent.
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Lisa Featherston
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Mar 15, 2012
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Poor Customer Service/support
Okay... I finally worked all of this out because I was getting confused. I just hung up with ACS who currently serices an FFEL low of mine. Before I called them, I attempted to register at myedaccount.com as you've mentioned and it continually gave me the error message claiming my date of birth does not match my ssn and I recall running into this confusion before. Certainly ACS has never had a problem finding me in association with my FFEL loan when I call and yet when I try to log into any ACS site other than acs-education.com I get this date of birth/social security conflict and I wanted to resolve this once and for all.
It was explained to me that logging into myedaccount.com will be rejected if you do not have a Direct Loan with ACS and if you do, it will recognize you based on your DOB and SSN. This is why mine was rejected. My loan that's serviced by ACS is a FFEL.
She explained to me that nothing has change in regards to the entities that currently service student loans. She said this could be Sallie Mae, ACS, Great Lakes or Fedloan and that if any student's loans are being serviced by these servicers, those particular servicers may not have multiple websites for each kind of loan whereas they do.
The four servicers mentioned above were supplied by the DoE and ACS is not one of the four. According to ACS (that I spoke with), they do service Stafford Loans (which are Federal loans) but that the original lender of my/your Stafford Loan(s) chose ACS to service those loans rather than these other entities. She then told me that if I wasn't sure who services each of my loans (Direct, FFEL, Consolidated, PLUS, etc...) I should log into the Student National Data System (which I was already aware of) at https://www.nslds.ed.gov/nslds_SA/ One this sight, click on the number beside the loan you want to know about and it will inform you of who is the servicer of that loan.
I did this process weeks ago in preparation for the Special Consolidation and it took forever but I couldn't avoid doing it. I had to know who was servicing the loan, what the original loan amount was, how much interest had accrued, what the interest percentage is, and what the current payoff amount is. This site supplies all of this information which is great because it means at any given time, I can find out what today's bottom line balance is.
So in an effort to help make sure we're all on the right track in keeping up with our accounts... ACS (FFEL) states only those students who have loans other than FFEL will be able to register on that site; otherwise the student's attempts will be rejected with an error message during registration. They also verified for me that they are currently servicing only one of my student loans when I actually have five loans total. Others are servicing the four remaining loans. Since I told her I was so confused and needed to confirm whether or not ACS is "The" servicer for all Direct Loans and she clearly stated that (with the slightest hint of frustration by my continued confusion) what we're being told is absolutely not true and that the student's loan servicing entity depends solely on that student's lender. She also made it very clear to me that to avoid confusion and any potential late payments or fear of default, I must obtain my loan information, which includes the loan servicer's name(s) and contact information from the student loan data system.
According to the DoE, whom I also called, if you contact them in regards to your student loans, they will direct you to your servicer's and/or where to get the information.
Dealing with financial responsibilities makes me very nervous. Because I have so many loans with so many different entities, I don't know from one minute to the next if I'm coming or going. Finally being introduced to the Student Loan Data System, the confusion is FINALLY resolve and I can breathe. Plus this Special Consolidate will eliminate all worry because rather than having to write 5 checks each month, I will only have to write one... Thank God!
Imsmith55 - it might be worthwhile to check out that data system to ensure ACS is the only one servicing your loan(s). Do you have more than one lender? The ridiculous number of lenders I have really irritates me because lender choices are basically out of the student's hands. At any given time, the school could (and often do) choose to do their student aid business with a different lender, thereby automatically turning your single lender into two lenders without any vote from you. It's happened to me multiple times and for this reason, it's no wonder students who borrow Stafford loans remain in a constant state of confusion. Some schools don't do that but most do and it needs to stop. THAT'S my complaint for complaintboard.com today. : ) Let me know if you find conflicting information on the data system about your loans. I'm curious because none of us can always believe what we see and here and I've got to be on top of my responsibilities in this area. Good luck.
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