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Enrollments

All you need to know about Enrollments

Enrollment is a key feature that lets Partners enroll their qualifying users in Income-Driven Repayment plans chosen from the Repayment Options API endpoint. Additional information about the Borrower must be sent in with the request to create an Enrollment, and a valid income certification for the Borrower must have already been provided via the Borrower create/update endpoints if the borrower has income.

Requirements to Enroll

For an Enrollment to be created, several preconditions must be met:

  • the Borrower must have Loans
  • Borrower.ssn must have been provided in a create/update API request
  • Borrower.phone must have been provided in a create/update API request
  • an Address for the Borrower must have been provided (at least street1, city, state, and zipcode)
  • an IncomeCertification must have been provided unless the borrower is both unemployed and not collecting_unemployment
  • the Borrower must not be an active student (FULL TIME or THREE QUARTER TIME)

NOTE: If one or more of these preconditions is not met, calls to Create an Enrollment will return a 409 Conflict response.

Loan Servicers

All Loans must have a supported servicer_name to be eligible for and included in an IDR Enrollment. Only federally-backed loans may have their repayment plans changed via this enrollment process. Private loans will be excluded from any Enrollment request. The request is transmitted to the loans' Servicer(s), so we cannot process enrollments unless a servicer has been provided for each loan. The supported federal servicers are:

  • Cornerstone
  • Fedloan
  • Granite State
  • Great Lakes
  • HESC
  • Mohela
  • Naviet
  • Nelnet
  • OSLA

Loans without a servicer will not be enrolled in the plan!

Repayment Plans

Every Enrollment must identify the repayment_plan a Borrower wishes to enroll in. The repayment_plan must be one of the supported IDR plans:

  • paye
  • repaye
  • ibr
  • new_ibr
  • icr

These strings correspond to the repayment_plan.type attribute found on a RepaymentOption returned from the Repayment Options endpoint. There is only one ibr plan currently offered, but it has different terms depending on when the borrower first took out a loan—hence the 2009 and 2014 distinctions. This endpoint will accept either ibr (2009) or new_ibr (2014) and funnel those into a single ibr option to streamline the workflow of passing results from Repayment Options into here.

Signatures

Passing "signature": true is our confirmation that a Partner (that's you!) has obtained the necessary permissions from a Borrower to make enrollment filings on their behalf. Partners are responsible for obtaining this permission from their borrowers. Usually a brief line of text near the submission button indicating to the effect of "by clicking Submit you authorize us and our affiliates to request the necessary changes to your Repayment Plan." But don't just copy that! Be sure to consult your lawyer first. This request will return a 422 Unprocessable Entity if the signature param is false or omitted.

Unprocessable Enrollments

Sometimes, our internal review catches enrollments that should not be processed. This could be because of a large discrepancy between a borrower's reported AGI and the AGI on their supplied Income Certification, or perhaps the borrower requested enrollment in a plan that raises their monthly payment, total cost, and repayment term (ie, it's an all-around worse plan). In that case, we mark an enrollment as unprocessable. This is very similar to the cancelled status, with the difference being who is taking the action—only a Borrower may cancel an enrollment, whereas a Payitoff administrator marks an enrollment as unprocessable.

Previewing Enrollment forms

The Enrollment Preview endpoint generates a URL which contains an unsigned copy of a borrower's Enrollment Request form in PDF format. Unsigned here means the borrower's signature is not applied to the document. You can present this form to the borrower for their records or to facilitate manual processing of an IDR application. For security reasons, the URL will expire after 10 minutes.

NOTE: This form is intended for borrowers to preview. The bundle contains highly sensitive information, including the borrower's Social Security Number and Income Certification (eg tax returns). Precautions must be taken so the form is only revealed to appropriate parties.

Canceling Enrollments

An Enrollment that's in the pending status may be cancelled. This is useful in case the borrower has made a mistake and wants to undo the request. However, there's a limited window where this is possible- generally 24-48 hours after creating the Enrollment. Attempting to cancel a request after this window will result in a 409 Conflict response.