"As the fall semester rapidly approaches, students worried about covering tuition in an increasingly volatile loan market will have a new set of options to try. All they have to do is go online, create a personalized profile and friend the right people," Inside Higher Ed reports. "The answer to students' educational finance woes aren't to be found on Facebook, necessarily, but the popularity and influence of the social networking model undoubtedly influenced the latest crop of private loan companies aimed at students, dubbed 'social lending' or 'social finance.' Rather than marketing loans to customers in the traditional sense, the companies facilitate a more direct connection between individual borrowers and lenders, building upon the 'peer to peer' or 'people to people' model that's used in applications from downloading music to offering microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries."