Going Merry
Going Merry became part of a lender. That matters.
When you're looking for scholarships, you're trying to find money you won't have to borrow. So yes, we think it's relevant when a scholarship service becomes part of a lending company. Ownership belongs next to the feature list, where students can actually see it.
The acquisition is a matter of record
On September 15, 2021, Earnest announced that it had acquired Going Merry. The release described bringing scholarship and financial-aid tools together with Earnest's lending business. Earnest identified itself as a Navient subsidiary at the time.
Earnest's September 2021 acquisition announcementWe think the incentives deserve scrutiny
A student can arrive at a scholarship site hoping to reduce borrowing. A business that also offers loans has another product it can sell that student. That tension is worth asking about. It doesn't prove that anyone was pressured into a loan, that recommendations were manipulated, or that student data was sold. We're not claiming any of those things. We are saying that the relationship should be easy to understand before you create an account.
Our choice is to keep loans out of Wonaride
We don't offer loan products and have no plans to add them. We want students paying for Wonaride to be paying for useful scholarship application tools. If you need borrowing advice, a scholarship search shouldn't quietly become that conversation. You should get to choose when and where to have it.
Why we're keeping loan products outThe later closure is a separate question
We don't know why Going Merry closed. The acquisition announcement doesn't answer that, and we won't turn an objection to the business model into an unsupported story about the shutdown. You can question the incentives without pretending to know what happened inside the company.