If you're a student with federal loans, you may have noticed that your loans are now serviced by a company called Aidvantage. Here's why:
The Department of Education recently transitioned to a new loan servicing platform, and as part of that transition, they selected Aidvantage as the servicer for all new federal student loans. So if you have any new federal student loans that were originated after the transition (which occurred on October 1, 2019), they will be serviced by Aidvantage.
Aidvantage is a relative newcomer to the student loan servicing world, but they're actually owned by one of the biggest players in the industry: Nelnet. Nelnet is a large, publicly-traded company that services both federal and private student loans. They also happen to be one of the four companies that service most of the existing federal student loan portfolio. So while Aidvantage may be new to you, they're actually part of a much larger organization with lots of experience in servicing student loans.
One thing to keep in mind is that although your loan servicer may change from time to time (as happened here), your actual lender will not change. So if you have federal loans that were originated before October 1, 2019 and are currently being serviced by another company (such as FedLoan Servicing or Navient), those loans will remain with their current servicers. Only new federal loans will go to Aidvantage.