This project was made possible through our partnership with DataKind, a volunteer-led organization that harnesses the power of data science for social good. We are especially grateful to Muhammad Raees, our volunteer data scientist, for his expertise and dedication in developing this dashboard. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Betsy Mayotte from The Institute of Student Loan Advisors (TISLA), Carolina Rodriguez and Nancy Nierman from Community Service Society of New York (CSSNY), Winston Berkman Breen and Amy Czulada from the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) for their valuable insights and thoughtful feedback, which will help shape potential improvements to the final version of the dashboard.

Note: Interactive dashboards are available at the bottom of this page. To ensure you get the most value from them, we encourage you to first review the important context and usage guidelines below.

Foreword

Amid ongoing threats to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and uncertainty about its future role in protecting consumers from financial abuses—including in student lending—we are releasing an early beta version of our student loan complaints dashboard. While this dashboard focuses specifically on student loans, the CFPB's broader mission includes protecting consumers from a wide range of financial harms across the banking and financial industries. The dashboard, still under development, provides regularly updated visualizations of borrower complaints by continuously drawing data from the CFPB complaints database, highlighting just one critical area of the CFPB’s essential functions.

We are deeply concerned about the consequences of recent efforts to undermine the CFPB, an agency uniquely dedicated to protecting Americans from financial abuses. The CFPB plays a crucial role by conducting research, supervising financial institutions, investigating abuses, issuing necessary regulations, and enforcing laws that ensure fairness in financial markets. Its continued effectiveness is essential to safeguarding consumers from both minor and major financial exploitation.

While consumers are still encouraged to file complaints, alarming reports from the Senate Banking Committee indicate an 80% decline in complaint processing due to recent attacks on the agency. This significant drop undermines consumer protections that are urgently needed.

About the Dashboard

The Student Loan Complaints Dashboard compiles data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—a crucial watchdog agency responsible for protecting student loan borrowers. This interactive tool provides a visual representation of borrower complaints submitted to the CFPB, offering policymakers, researchers, and advocates deeper insights into the challenges borrowers face.

This beta version is a work in progress, and we are actively incorporating stakeholder feedback to refine its visuals, improve data contextualization, and enhance its overall functionality.

The dashboard offers a high-level analysis of borrower complaints, highlighting trends, complaint volumes, and how these issues relate to borrower debt levels. However, student loan complaints are nuanced, and we are committed to ensuring that the data tells the full and accurate story.

How to Use the Dashboard

The Student Loan Complaints Dashboard is designed to help users explore borrower complaints and identify key trends. Here’s how you can navigate the tool:

Filter by State and Date – View an overview of borrower complaints by selecting a specific state or time period to track trends over time.
Analyze Complaints Over Time – See how the volume of student loan complaints have changed year by year, helping to identify timeframes with an increase in complaints.
Explore the Heat Map – Understand borrower debt loads across different regions, highlighting areas with the highest student loan burdens.
Identify Top Complaint Issues – Discover the most frequent problems borrowers report, such as repayment struggles, loan servicing errors, and misinformation.
Compare Servicer Complaints – See which loan servicers receive the most complaints.

Key Considerations & Caveats

Context Matters:

Borrower complaints represent only a portion of the student loan experience. The nature and origination of complaints may vary widely. For example, some borrowers may not fully understand their loan terms, while others seek help rather than filing formal complaints. While it may be easy to frame servicers as "bad actors," the real issue often lies in systemic failures, lack of transparency, and the complexity of student loan servicing.

Resolution vs. Relief:

A closed complaint does not necessarily indicate a satisfactory resolution for the borrower. We are working to differentiate between true resolutions and complaints that are closed without meaningful action.

Federal vs. Private Loans:

While the CFPB primarily handles private student loan complaints, federal student loan complaints fall under the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) office. While our dashboard identifies trends across both sectors, we are exploring ways to validate and supplement this data with additional sources.

Loan Servicers & Market Share:

Some servicers appear to have disproportionately high complaint volumes, but this must be considered relative to their market share—servicers with larger borrower portfolios naturally generate more complaints. Our analysis does not yet account for servicer size and borrower volume to provide a fair and balanced comparison.

Key Trends & Data Enhancements

We are actively refining the dashboard to provide deeper insights through additional filters and comparisons. Some of the key questions we are exploring include:

General: Who is filing complaints? What percentage of borrowers formally report issues?
Geographic Insights: Do complaints vary by state or region? Could overlays of state policies, Ombudsman presence, and Attorney General actions reveal deeper trends?
Servicer Comparisons: How does complaint volume change when adjusted for market share?
Complaint Categorization: How can we better distinguish between requests for help vs. formal disputes to improve the interpretability of the data?

Expanding Our Insights with Social Listening

In addition to tracking formal complaints, we explored ways to integrate social listening to capture real-time borrower experiences beyond official reporting channels. Many borrowers turn to Twitter, Reddit, and online forums to share frustrations, seek advice, and highlight servicing issues that may never be formally reported. By analyzing these discussions alongside CFPB complaint data, we aim to identify emerging trends earlier, track borrower sentiment, and uncover gaps in loan servicing and repayment assistance. See our report here.

How You Can Help

We want this dashboard to be a valuable resource for policymakers, researchers, journalists, and advocates. Your feedback will help us refine its accuracy, usability, and impact. We encourage you to share your insights! If you have suggestions for additional filters, contextual layers, or data points, we’d love to hear from you.

This is just the beginning—our goal is to build a powerful, transparent tool that drives better student loan policies and protections. Stay tuned!

What Borrowers with Complaints Can Do

Fortunately, during the first Trump administration, we successfully led efforts to establish a state-level Student Loan Borrowers' Bill of Rights in Massachusetts. This legislation created a dedicated Student Loan Ombudsman and a specialized Student Loan Assistance Unit to help borrowers resolve their complaints directly with the state.

If you are seeking free, neutral and clear student loan advice and dispute resolution assistance, we encourage you to contact The Institute of Student Loan Advisors (TISLA).

If you are a Massachusetts resident, we encourage you to file your complaint directly with the state's Student Loan Ombudsman Assistance Unit HERE . If you reside outside Massachusetts, please visit this resource for guidance on where to direct your complaint HERE.