Hello,

My name is Nate Matherson, and my company runs The Student Loan Report.

We created The Student Loan Report in 2016 as a source for news on the student loan industry, financial aid, and scholarships. At the time, we were building a marketplace for student loans, LendEDU, and felt we could contribute to the conversation. Especially because each of us had deep and personal experience finding student loans from trustworthy lenders. Personally, I graduated from college with over $50,000 in student loan debt. Today, I am still working to repay the majority of that debt.

As we prepared to launch The Student Loan Report, we debated who should author it, and felt that it was really a blend of our personal experiences and perspectives that would create the best source material, so we created a pen name of “Drew Cloud,” and conceived a background that we felt personified a lot of the perseverance we hoped to inspire with The Student Loan Report. When we pictured what Drew Cloud looked like, we pictured a friend of ours from college, so we used his photo (with his permission) to round out the pen name.

We used this character of “Drew Cloud” as the primary author of the site --  a shared pen name through which we could share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face while funding their education. There were also other pen names used to publish content on the site. The thoughts, stories, and opinions come from the actual experiences of our team. We have always held ourselves to high standards of content quality -- all of the data we published on The Student Loan Report was vetted, accurate, and licensed from the related polling companies.

Now that you have that background, and now that I have been able to reflect on how we got here, I want to apologize for a couple things:

(1) We never disclosed that “Drew Cloud” was a pen name that represented a group of us writing these posts. I really regret that. We are proud of our personal backgrounds and where they have brought us today. We should’ve chosen to be clear about who was authoring the posts. We have made a change on the site, effective immediately, to use each author’s real name for every post. We will also retroactively notate posts by Drew Cloud.

(2) We have always worked to keep editorial separation between The Student Loan Report and our other site, LendEDU.com, which is our main business. However, there have been nine Student Loan Report articles that mention LendEDU. We now realize that we should’ve had a disclosure that the sites were owned by the same company.

We are deeply sorry for any confusion or frustration our readers may feel. Please reach out to us at hello@studentloans.net with any questions or concerns about past content.

 

About The Student Loan Report

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The Student Loan Report was started in 2016 to provide unbiased coverage on the latest student loan news and information. The Student Loan Report also creates resources and guides for borrowers and their families so they make the best decisions when it comes to paying for college and repaying student debt. Some examples of these include guides for private student loans and student loan refinancing and consolidation. If you ever have any questions or need advice, feel free to reach out to us - we are happy to help!