PWA is the First Executive Protection Academy to Offer Income-Based Repayment Student Loan Options Through Partnership with Edly

Every institution says it cares about access. Fewer institutions do anything about it when the moment actually calls for it.

But we at Pacific West Academy do.

This month, PWA became an approved partner school with Edly, giving students in our Certified Executive Security Specialist (CESS) program access to income-based repayment (IBR) loans.

I want to explain why this matters, not just as a financing detail, but as a statement about who we think should be able to walk through our doors. Most private student loans were never built for the students who actually enroll in career training programs. They assume a cosigner with strong credit. They assume a fixed monthly payment starting the moment the loan is disbursed, regardless of whether the borrower has a job yet. For a veteran transitioning out of service, or a civilian career-changer without a decade of credit history behind them, that model disqualifies the exact people who most need the program.

IBR loans work differently.

• There is no cosigner required. The loan is evaluated on the borrower and the program, not on a parent’s or spouse’s credit file.
• No credit history needed to apply, which matters enormously for veterans and career-changers who haven’t built one yet.
• Payments scale with income after completion, instead of starting as a fixed obligation on day one.
• Deferment options exist if a borrower loses a job or their income drops below a qualifying threshold.

This changes who can realistically say yes to a program like ours, and that is a real shift.

 Income-based repayment is not a new idea for federal loans. It dates back to the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 and became available to borrowers in July 2009. But that has only ever applied to federal loans. Private lenders never built an equivalent, because banks underwrite on credit scores and cosigners, not future earning potential.

That changed in 2019, when Edly launched as the first private-sector platform to offer income-based repayment loans. Within about three years, Edly had funded more than 4,000 students through more than 1,500 partner schools. Today that footprint has grown to over 1,700 institutions nationally.

Edly underwrites without a traditional credit score, relying instead on outcomes data — completion and earnings data from the Department of Education and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, plus its own loan performance history. That approach only works in fields with well-documented, predictable post-completion earnings, which is why Edly’s borrower base has concentrated heavily in nursing, STEM, business, accounting, and education.

And PWA’s job placement rate won us a title of being the first institution within the Executive Protection training industry to partner with Edly.

That history is exactly why this partnership makes sense for PWA. Edly did not start as a generalist lender that happened to add schools over time. It built its model around fields where a real funding gap was costing the country workers it needed — nursing first, and other workforce-critical fields since. Executive security training belongs in that same category: genuine demand, a labor pool disproportionately made up of veterans, and qualified candidates who have been priced out by financing built for a different kind of student.

We are not going to pretend this closes every gap. We built PWA to train people for a field that badly needs them. Financing shouldn’t be the reason a qualified candidate never gets there.