Student Loans

Texarkana College participates in the William D. Ford Direct Loan program, which offers Subsidized and Unsubsidized student loans to help students meet college expenses. These are federal, long-term loans offered through the FAFSA application to help students meet college expenses. Texarkana College encourages students to explore and apply for other types of available aid that do not have to be repaid (grants, scholarships, etc.) before applying for loans, but they are available for those who need them.

Subsidized loans are need-based, meaning that your Student Aid Index (SAI) calculated by the FAFSA application is taken into consideration when offering or awarding this loan. Subsidized loans do not begin to accrue interest until the student graduates or is no longer attending college at least half-time (i.e. not taking at least 6 credit hours per semester).

Unsubsidized loans are non-need-based, meaning they can be awarded to any student (regardless of family income) as long as all other eligibility requirements are met. Unsubsidized loans do begin to accrue interest immediately upon disbursement, including while the student is still in college.

Students are always offered subsidized loans first, provided they qualify. Unsubsidized loans will only be offered if the student does not qualify for subsidized loans or if unsubsidized loans are needed to match the student’s dollar request once subsidized loans have been awarded within the student’s eligibility.

Students are encouraged to contact the Texarkana College Financial Aid Office for budgeting assistance if they have questions related to loan borrowing.

• Direct Subsidized Loan
• Direct Unsubsidized Loan

Texarkana College is a public two-year college with relatively inexpensive tuition and fee rates. In an effort to keep student loan debt to minimum, Federal Direct Loans are not awarded automatically and are only packaged if specifically requested by the student.

To apply for a student loan at Texarkana College, interested students should complete the following steps in the order shown below:

1. FAFSA: Complete a FAFSA application at FAFSA.gov for the current year. If your FAFSA gets selected for a review process called “verification,” all documents connected to that verification review must be received and evaluated by the TC Financial Aid Office before the loan application process can proceed.
2. MPN and Entrance Counseling: Wait to receive an email from Texarkana College saying your FAFSA has been received. From there, log in at StudentAid.gov, look under “My Checklists” and then “I’m In School,” and complete Entrance Counseling and a Master Promissory Note (MPN) for Undergraduate Direct Loans. Choose Texarkana College as the school to notify for both documents.
3. Enroll in Courses: Register for at least 6 credit hours that apply to your graduation requirements at TC. If your major offers its classes mostly in half-semester classes (8 or 5 weeks), your combination of financial aid eligible credit hours for the big-picture Fall, Spring, or Summer semester must add up to at least 6 credit hours to qualify for a loan. For example, 3 hours in the first 8 weeks plus 3 hours in the second 8 weeks equals 6 hours for the semester, which meets the loan minimum.
4. Loan Request Form: First-time borrowers should visit the Texarkana College Financial Aid Office with their Texarkana College student ID card or a valid government-issued photo ID to fill out a loan request form. The loan request form is where you will indicate the exact dollar amount of student loans you want to request. Texarkana College will attempt to award student loans up to your request, but not over that amount. Loans may be requested within a range, depending on your student category. See the “Loan Limits” section of this web page. Students should request budgeting assistance from TC Financial Aid Office staff if they have any questions on how much to borrow to cover their college expenses.
5. Accept Loan Offer: Students will be sent an email offer of their loan award that includes a link to the TC Financial Aid Portal online. Students must log in to the TC Financial Aid Portal to accept their loan offer before it can be used to pay for college expenses.

More information about some of these individual steps is outlined below.

Before a student loan request can be processed, first-time borrowers of Federal Direct Loans at Texarkana College must complete both “Entrance Counseling for Student Loan Borrowers” and a “Master Promissory Note (MPN) for Undergraduate Students” at StudentAid.gov. These are both federal requirements to borrow federal student loans. No action will be taken on a loan request form if Texarkana College has not received the electronic file confirming you have completed these requirements.

Entrance Counseling provides comprehensive information on the terms and conditions of the loan and of the borrower’s rights and responsibilities. Students are strongly encouraged to visit with Financial Aid Office staff members if they have any questions about loans or the loan repayment process after completing this counseling.

The Master Promissory Note (MPN) is your legally binding promise to repay the funds you borrow under the Federal Direct Loan Program at Texarkana College. The MPN also contains the fees, interest rates, terms and conditions of your student loan.

Students should list Texarkana College as the school they want to receive these documents when completing them online. Once this is done, electronic files confirming completion for both will be sent to Texarkana College. The average time for the entrance counseling confirmation file to process, be sent, and download into the student information system at the college is 3 to 4 days.

Many factors can limit the amount students can borrow under the Direct Loan program. Sometimes more than one type of limit may apply to a student. In that case, the most restrictive one applies. Below are some of the most important student loan limitations to be aware of.

Federal Annual Limit

The government establishes annual (“August-to-August” school year) limits on how much students can borrow based on their student category.

Dependent vs. Independent: Students are considered dependents if they had to include parent information on the FAFSA. They are independent if they only had to include their own or their spouse’s information.

First Year vs. Second Year: Students are considered first-year (freshmen) if they have completed 29 credits or less at Texarkana College. They are considered second-year if they have completed 30 credits or more. Because TC is a two-year school, we do not have categories above sophomore.

Unsubsidized loan limits can vary depending on a student’s subsidized loan eligibility, but a student’s subsidized and unsubsidized loan amounts added together cannot exceed the annual combined total limit.

Semester Loan Limit

Students may not receive more than half of their annual loan limit in a single semester. For example, a Second-Year Dependent student who could take out $6,500 annually would be limited to no more than $3,250 in Direct Loans for a one-semester loan. Students should reference the annual loan limit above for their category, then divide by two, to determine their potential one-semester limit.

“Schedule of Reductions” for Less Than Full-Time Students

The government requires that students who are not enrolled or scheduled to enroll full-time must have their student loan limits prorated. Full-time enrollment is considered being enrolled in 12 credit hours that are eligible for financial aid for a one-semester loan, or 24 credit hours for a two-semester loan.

For Fall-Spring loans offered at the beginning of the school year before actual Spring enrollment has begun, a student’s Spring enrollment may have to be assumed in order to calculate their loan eligibility. For students enrolled in majors that normally take classes offered in a block (for example, nursing degrees, workforce certificates, etc.), their major’s regular scheduled block will be used to calculate their assumed future enrollment. For all other students, their Spring enrollment will be assumed to equal their Fall enrollment.

If a student wishes to request an increase to their Spring loan offer on the basis of enrolling in more credit hours than the logic above would assume (for example, if an RN Nursing student takes an academic course such as a Fine Arts course needed for their degree plan in addition to their nursing classes, or if a Business Administration major takes 6 hours in Fall but then enrolls in 12 hours in Spring), then they should contact the TC Financial Aid Office to request an increase. While reductions based on fewer credit hours will take place automatically, increases will not take place automatically from additional hours, since student loans are debt a student will be responsible for repaying later.

If a student earns a “W” grade in one or more classes, the “W” grade class will be considered subtracted from their total enrollment for purposes of this loan calculation, and any future, undisbursed loan payments they are scheduled to receive may be reduced. Any schedule change that occurs in the drop/add period (early enough that no grade is assigned) that reduces a student’s enrolled credit hours can also result in loan amounts being recalculated and lowered.

Cost of Attendance Limit

All students receive a “Cost of Attendance” budget when receiving financial aid (including student loans) that includes reasonable estimates for their cost of education and for education-related expenses they may experience during the school year. Besides being useful for budgeting purposes, the government requires colleges to use this Cost of Attendance budget as a “cap” for the total amount of financial aid a student may receive during the school year.

Students receive a Cost of Attendance budget for both the academic year and for the semester, and any student loan must fit within both budgets along with other financial assistance a student may be receiving.

The Cost of Attendance limit rarely impacts full-time students. However, it may impact you if you are either part-time (enrolled in less than 12 credit hours) or receive a very substantial amount of other types of financial aid.

Single-Semester Proration Limit for Graduating Students

If students borrow a single-semester loan in their final semester before graduation, the government requires an additional proration step that may reduce your semester loan limit if you are enrolled less than full-time.

Aggregate (Lifetime) Loan Limits

The federal government establishes lifetime limits on how much total federal student loan debt students can take out as undergraduates. Once these limits are reached, students cannot receive new federal student loans until they pay back some of what they have previously borrowed.

No student (dependent or independent) may borrow more than $23,000 in Subsidized Loans. The combined aggregate loan limit for undergraduates (for Subsidized and Unsubsidized Loans combined) is $31,000 for dependent students and $57,500 for independent students.

Students sometimes need to change the amount of their student loan. As an example, you may receive a late-arriving scholarship or grant that reduces your need for loans, or you might realize you didn’t borrow quite enough to cover your education costs. You can generally request changes to your loan amount after the initial award.

Increases require that you meet all general qualifications for loans and haven’t already met your loan limit for the semester or year. Decreases must occur no later than 14 days after the loan has disbursed. If you wish to return a loan you don’t need after the 14-day time period after disbursement, you should instead repay the loan directly to your federal loan servicer.

For either an increase or a decrease, please visit the TC Financial Aid Office and request a Loan Increase/Decrease Form.

Once a student accepts their offered student loan, the balance is first credited to their student account at Texarkana College to cover the cost of any unpaid tuition and fees. If the student has previously set up an installment payment plan for their tuition, the student loan will be treated as payment toward the remaining installments and will reduce or cancel them.

Beginning about 1-2 weeks prior to the start of the semester, students can use their student loan to purchase books, school supplies, or tool kits at the TC Bookstore. Students can use loans at the bookstore until the disbursement and refund period begins (usually a little over a month into the semester).

Texarkana College’s policy is to always disburse each semester’s student loan payment in two approximately equal halves each semester. As an important distinction, “disbursement” is when colleges officially draw down a loan from the government to apply it to a student’s charges, while “refund” is when anything left over after the charges are fully paid goes out to a student for use outside the college environment. The first half of a loan will be disbursed at the same time that Pell Grant and other scholarships are. The second half will normally be disbursed by itself about a month later (sometimes shorter in Summer).

This means that depending on by how much a student’s loan and other financial aid exceeds their tuition balance and bookstore charges, they may receive two student loan refunds, or may only receive a refund at the point of the second disbursement. Students who request a loan late into the semester may receive both “halves” at the same time, depending on timing, because their loan was disbursed after the regular scheduled dates for the broader semester.

Student loans can never be requested retroactively. That is, they cannot be requested for a semester that has already passed.

The Financial Aid Office also establishes internal deadlines for how late into the semester we accept loan requests. As a rule of thumb, we usually stop accepting new loan requests around the middle of the month before the semester ends (for example, around mid-November for a semester ending in December, or mid-April for a semester ending in May), but the exact date varies by semester. Please contact the TC Financial Aid Office directly if it is late in the semester and you need the precise deadline.

You must begin repaying your student loan once you are no longer enrolled in at least 6 credit hours in the fall or spring semester. The first time you stop, you get a 6-month break called a “grace period.” Your first loan payments begin after that.

Your payments must be made to your loan servicer, the “middle-man” between you and the federal government for your loan. All questions about payment plan options, payment breaks (deferment or forbearance), and loan forgiveness should go through your servicer. You will get assigned to a loan servicer about midway through your first semester with a student loan, and not all students at TC will have the same loan servicer. Find yours by logging in at StudentAid.gov.

Whenever a student who has borrowed student loans graduates, transfers to a new college, or drops below half-time enrollment (6 credit hours in Fall and Spring), they must complete the online Exit Counseling for Student Loan Borrowers at StudentAid.gov. The online counseling will provide comprehensive information on repayment options, repayment plans, loan deferments, loan forbearances, and debt management strategies. Exit counseling should be completed by a student whenever they graduate, transfer to a new college, or drop below 6 hours.

A hold may be placed on a student’s account to prevent the release of their transcript or diploma if exit counseling is not completed in a timely fashion.

Completing Exit Counseling does not prevent a student from taking out new student loans in the future.

The Department of Education keeps a record for each college of the percentage of students who go into default on their student loans over a 3-year period after entering repayment, a measurement called a Cohort Default Rate (CDR). Texarkana College’s CDR for the most recent three calculated years can be viewed by visiting the Cohort Default Rate searchable database, entering our school code of 003628 in the “OPEID” field, and clicking “Search.”

Texarkana College takes the issue of student loan default very seriously, and we consider successful loan repayment an integral part of overall student success. Luckily, with the options available to you, there is no valid reason anyone should have to go into default on their student loan. Options such as income-based repayment mean that there is a payment plan made to fit any budget, there are loan forgiveness or discharge options available to students in certain circumstances, and you can ask for temporary breaks called “deferment” or “forbearance” if needed. The key to all of these is talking to your student loan servicer (the third-party company managing your loan on the government’s behalf) and staying in good contact with them.

If you are unsure who your loan servicer is, you can log in to StudentAid.gov using your FSA ID (FAFSA login). This website will give you a full record of your loan borrowing history and your loan servicer’s contact information. You can also learn more about avoiding loan default there. If you are graduating or taking a break from school, be sure to complete Exit Counseling on StudentAid.gov to ensure you get to take advantage of your full 6-month grace period.