Has Darden developed any partnerships with lenders who provide the kind foreign-friendly loans that do not, for example, require a cosigner?
No, but we’re working on something like that. There are no banks, currently, that are willing to set up such a partnership for loan programs strictly for international students. The difficulty is that you have to be able to offer banks the full student body, meaning that they are offered preferred-lender status and all students, after borrowing money from the government, are next encouraged to turn to that banking institution. The fact is that no lender offers students simple interest loan rates as low as 6% while they’re in school and 8% when they graduate, which is what the Darden Foundation offers. Because of that, no bank is willing to simply take on the international population for one year, as the international students themselves want to return to the Darden Foundation, with its lower interest rate, in their second year. Meanwhile, our domestic students wish to have the lower interest rates offered by the Darden Foundation as well. Everybody goes through the Darden Foundation fo
