HESC offers your students a wide range of services designed to help them prepare for college, investigate careers, plan for financial aid, and learn valuable financial literacy skills. Our Web site features online applications and status checks, as well as comprehensive resources for grant, scholarship and loan information.

Entrance/Exit Counseling

Our comprehensive entrance/exit interview package helps you deliver important messages to your students while ensuring your compliance with federal regulations.

Our entrance counseling materials include an informative brochure, Student Guide to Smart Borrowing and Your Financial Future, that provides students with information on loan eligibility requirements, interest rates and the rights and responsibilities of their loan obligations. We also offer an envelope, in which your students can store all loan records and correspondence, and a FFEL borrower signature/information form.

For exit counseling, our brochure, Paying Your Loan is Serious Business, reinforces the student's loan obligation and provides information about budgeting their money and repaying their loans after graduation. The exit counseling package also includes our customizable letter template in which schools can insert their average indebtedness information as required, and the FFEL borrower signature/information form, which asks for updated student contact information.

HESC is also an active participant in Mapping Your Future. This innovative online counseling service helps students fulfill the entrance and exit counseling requirements from the convenience of their computers and enables them to understand their rights and responsibilities as student borrowers.

Financial Literacy Program

With credit more available than ever, students need a financial education in order to make informed personal finance decisions and to use credit wisely. That's why HESC has created the Financial Awareness and Consumer Training for Students (FACTS) program. FACTS will help you with your efforts to increase student awareness of the dangers of accumulating too much debt and of the benefits of saving more of the money they do have. FACTS may even help lower your school's default rate. Learn more about FACTS.

NYGEAR UP

As the lead administering agency for this federal Department of Education grant, HESC is charged with establishing, maintaining and coordinating the work of a statewide network maximizing the access to higher education for 6,500 at-risk students. Through a comprehensive, innovative array of guidance services, GEAR UP works with community groups and businesses to mentor students toward achieving the dream of going to college.

HESC Advocates

The HESC Advocate Unit helps your student borrowers who have withdrawn or dropped below half-time study, with the goal of keeping them from defaulting. Staff members contact borrowers while they are still in their grace period and up to 30 days of delinquency, counseling them about the importance of completing their education, repayment options, forbearance, and types of deferments.

New York's College Access Challenge Grant

HESC is using this 2-year federal grant to provide special college access activities, services, and programs for high-need students and families through establishment of the New York College Access Network, and sub-grants to front-line agencies and organizations throughout the state.