The United States Department of Education (DOE) and its Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) maintain a number of systems that track student loans, including:
- National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS): Contains information about loans and grants awarded to students under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965. According to the FSA, the NSLDS provides a centralized, integrated view of Title IV loans and grants during their complete life cycle, from aid approval through disbursement, repayment, deferment, delinquency and closure.
- Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) System: Financial Aid Administrators, Servicers, or other officials can use this site to perform a variety of functions related to student/award/disbursement data for Pell, Direct Loan and Teach Grant programs.
- Common Services for Borrowers (CSB): The information contained in this system is maintained for various purposes relating to aid applicants and recipients, cosigners and endorsers of loan applications for HEA program funds.
- Enterprise Data Management and Analytics Platform Services (EDMAPS): A data analytics platform that ingests data from multiple Federal Student Aid systems of records to perform big-data analytics on FSA data in one common location, produce reports and statistical models and serve as a centralized repository of information about FSA customers across the full student aid life cycle.In September 2022, the Data Liberation Project (DLP) filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all records that document these four DOE student loan tracking systems. This included database diagrams, schema, data dictionaries, glossaries and user guides. The scope of DLP’s FOIA request did not include records from the databases themselves.
In September 2022, the Data Liberation Project (DLP) filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all records that document these four DOE student loan tracking systems. This included database diagrams, schema, data dictionaries, glossaries and user guides. The scope of DLP’s FOIA request did not include records from the databases themselves.
In December 2024, the DOE sent a partial response to the DLP’s FOIA request, which included:
- A letter outlining the DOE’s response.
- 2,327 pages related to the NSLDS and COD systems. Some content had been withheld under exemption (b)4, “Records or portions of records that contain trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person that is privileged or confidential.”
To get started with the documents, please consult the Data Liberation Project’s introductory documentation.