According to the New York Times, shopping around for private student loans will affect your credit score, unlike mortgages or house loans.

Conversely, you could easily overpay by going with the school’s recommended lender, as it may not be the best one for your position.

So what’s a family to do?

Read the entire article by clicking here.  Also, here’s an excert from the New York Times:

To quote a rate, lenders check an applicant’s credit history. And every time a shopper asks a lender for a rate quote, it can show up as another inquiry on a credit report.

Lots of inquiries send the wrong signals to the formulas that create the popular FICO credit score that Fair Isaac administers, namely that borrowers may be applying for multiple loans because they’re financially troubled and potentially going bankrupt.

While Fair Isaac has mined years of data to determine that people making a bunch of mortgage and auto loan applications over a short period are almost always innocently shopping for a loan, it hasn’t declared student loan shoppers similarly safe.

One reason is that the company doesn’t have a big pile of private student loan data to mine. These loans are relatively new, and not many people shopped around for the best rate before the student loan scandals erupted.