If the bank handling my college loans goes bankrupt, how will I be affected?

The loan won't go away. It'll simply be sold to a new bank. From your perspective, the only thing that would change is the address on the payment stub or however you make the payment. The amount, interest rate and other terms for the loan remain the same. Even if Citibank were to get bought by another bank, as Wamu did, the merger will take a few years to fully complete. In the meantime, you would still deal with Citibank. Your branch, account #, and all other information would remain the same for now. Eventually you will get a letter explaining how your accounts and everything will be merged over to the new bank, but access to your accounts and all that would remain uninterrupted. Even if this didn't happen, I had my student loans sold off to new banks while I was repaying them. All that happened was I got a letter from the old bank saying they'd sold my loan to a different bank. I then got a letter from the new bank explaining they had purchased my loan, and any differences I ...  more