Student Loan Borrower Survey Program

Under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is charged with researching, analyzing, and reporting on topics relating to the Bureau's mission, including consumer behavior, consumer awareness, and developments in markets for consumer financial products and services. To improve its understanding of how consumers engage with financial markets, the Bureau has successfully used credit record data as a sampling frame to survey people about their experiences in consumer credit markets. The Bureau now seeks to obtain approval for a new one-time survey of student loan borrowers to understand their borrowing decisions, their experience managing their loans, and their expectations for the future. The survey will be sent to a random sample selected from individuals in the Bureau's new Consumer Credit Information Panel (CCIP), which is itself a sample of de-identified credit records from one of the nationwide consumer reporting agencies. The survey responses will be matched to the Bureau's CCIP data to provide a more complete picture of borrowers' financial standing. The survey will follow similar methods to the Bureau’s prior Making Ends Meet and Survey of Consumer Views on Debt surveys, but sample a different population of borrowers and focus primarily on student loans. The Bureau will not receive Personally Identifiable Information; any such information will be removed by the contractor prior to delivering final products. We expect to recruit about 15,000 participants to participate in the survey. We will collect demographics, measures of financial well-being, consumers' feelings about their financial well-being, and experience with the student loan system, as well as behavioral measures related to seeking out financial information or willingness to take financial-related actions.

The latest form for Student Loan Borrower Survey Program expires 2026-10-31 and can be found here.