The fellas behind studentloans.net were caught deceiving student borrowers this week, thanks to an exposé from the Chronicle of Higher Education; just one day after the report was published, the Delaware charlatans want the world to know that they feel really bad about what they did.
LendEDU, the student-loan refinancing company that created a fictional expert who was widely quoted by media outlets, has apologized for hiding the fact that it created “Drew Cloud.”
That announcement was posted on the company’s website, the Student Loan Report, on Wednesday morning.
To understand the site’s downfall, one must first understand their rise.
It all started when Nate Matherson and Matt Lenhard created a blog called The Student Loan Report in 2016, just as they graduated college. The blog was designed to be a clickbaity, SEO-drenched feeder stream for LendEDU, a company they also own, which peddles student loan consolidation and other debt products, and even found some credibility via participation in Y Combinator.
LendEDU is a startup in our current Winter 2016 class that aims to do for the student debt market what Kayak has done for the online travel industry — making the process of shopping around for the best deal as easy and accessible as possible. LendEDU has built a marketplace for student loan refinancing that helps students, parents, and graduates save money through price transparency.
By offering overly simplistic and Google search-friendly explainers, tips, and tricks for student borrowers, quirky surveys, and polls that purported to offer glimpses into the minds of those saddled by educational debt, Cloud and the SLR team found a niche, if naive, audience, to whom they served up not-so-subtle sales pitches for LendEDU products such as student loan consolidation.
With a vague bio and blurry avatar of a white guy—who Matherson now admits is some random friend he and Lenhard knew from their days at the University of Delaware—Drew Cloud quickly built up a reputation as an “expert” on what’s sure to be the next American financial crisis. In between interviews and guest posts for smaller financial publications, Cloud’s “research” and poll data were also cited by reputable publications such as CNBC, Forbes, and The Boston Globe. No disclosure was ever made by the company to indicate that Cloud was not a real person, nor that LendEDU owned the very blog that was endorsing its products.
Yet Cloud has always featured prominently on the site; a June 2017 Web Archive capture of the site’s About page positions him as the site’s founder and primary contact for tips and general questions.
The Student Loan Report was founded in 2015 by Drew Cloud after he had difficulty finding the most recent student loan news and information all in once (sic) place.
If you have an idea for a story for The Student Loan Report, feel free to email drew@studentloans.net.
Here’s a totally fake bio for a totally fake person.
In April 20’s Wayback capture, nothing had changed on the About page, except for the founding year being pushed back to 2016. On Monday, after the Chronicle had been sniffing for over a week, but before they published the results of their investigation, Cloud was completely scrubbed from the site.
That’s not suspicious or anything.
Since Tuesday’s exposé, Matherson and Lenhard are racing to cover their butts. They’ve retroactively replaced Drew Cloud’s fraudulent bylines with the faceless “SLR Editor,” and vowed to use real author names from now on. They’ve also declared that they’ll prominently disclose LendEDU’s relationship to the Student Loan Report from here on out.
Currently, the site’s current About page makes no mention of Drew at all, and offers an advertiser disclosure that simply didn’t exist before the Chronicle expose; the disclosure still fails to mention that the site is owned by LendEDU.
ADVERTISER DISCLOSURE
Student Loan Report, LLC is paid by some of the companies featured on our website. Student Loan Report, LLC may earn a fee when our readers apply or receive a financial product featured on our website.
But they still seem to think they did nothing wrong by creating this “character.” In Matherson’s verbose, flowery non-admission of guilt, he apologizes for any confusion, but insists that their intentions were pure, and that since they relied on “personal” and “actual” experiences, it’s not really a big deal.
As we prepared to launch The Student Loan Report, we debated who should author it, and felt that it was really a blend of our personal experiences and perspectives that would create the best source material, so we created a pen name of “Drew Cloud,” and conceived a background that we felt personified a lot of the perseverance we hoped to inspire with The Student Loan Report. When we pictured what Drew Cloud looked like, we pictured a friend of ours from college, so we used his photo (with his permission) to round out the pen name.
We used this character of “Drew Cloud” as the primary author of the site -- a shared pen name through which we could share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face while funding their education. There were also other pen names used to publish content on the site. The thoughts, stories, and opinions come from the actual experiences of our team. [...]
Now that you have that background, and now that I have been able to reflect on how we got here, I want to apologize for a couple things:
(1) We never disclosed that “Drew Cloud” was a pen name that represented a group of us writing these posts. I really regret that. We are proud of our personal backgrounds and where they have brought us today. We should’ve chosen to be clear about who was authoring the posts. We have made a change on the site, effective immediately, to use each author’s real name for every post. We will also retroactively notate posts by Drew Cloud.
(2) We have always worked to keep editorial separation between The Student Loan Report and our other site, LendEDU.com, which is our main business. However, there have been nine Student Loan Report articles that mention LendEDU. We now realize that we should’ve had a disclosure that the sites were owned by the same company.
We are deeply sorry for any confusion or frustration our readers may feel.
Matherson also cites his own educational debt as proof that he has the purest of intentions and is absolutely not a bad guy, at all. It’s just a woulda coulda shoulda situation, see?
As for all the media outlets that leaned on Cloud for his expertise on such explosive subjects as “students are blowing their student loan money on Bitcoin?” They’re amending their coverage.
(Editor's note: A spokesman CNBC cited for this article from Student Loan Report, Drew Cloud, is not a real person, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education and confirmed by CNBC. In an article published April 24, the Chronicle reported that Cloud was in fact a fake entity created by the parent company of Student Loan Report, Shop Tutors, which also does business as LendEDU. In an effort to provide transparency, CNBC is preserving the original report published on March 23.)
It takes a special kind of soullessness to run a long con like this when one is this young. Let’s hope the exposé is the beginning of the end for these enterprising recent college grads who made it their life goal to succeed on the debts of their peers.