I believe it's more in the neighborhood of 1% for federal student loans. With the new legislation that ties student loan rates to the 10 year T note, student loans are a great deal with today's low interest rates especially if your income is low enough to tax deduct the interest, or you can lower it to that level by increasing your contributions to 401k, HSA, etc. The interest rate is fixed for the life of the loan so now's the time to lock in a low rate. When else will you get the opportunity to borrow that kind of money at that low of an interest rate totally unsecured? You're required to use the loan for qualified education expenses, but that rule isn't very restrictive since money is fungible and things like housing and food count as qualified expenses.

Apart from a mortgage, which is obviously not unsecured, requires income and down payment to qualify, etc. student loans are the best opportunity most people will ever get to borrow money at today's interest rates. If your income is low enough you won't even have to pay back the full amount owed because you can do income based repayment for 20 years and have Uncle Sam pay the remaining balance. Leveraged investing isn't for everyone, but if I were going back to school I'd take out as much as they would let me borrow and pay it off as slowly as possible.

Lobachevsky: Interesting idea to open two accounts at the same time so you already have the second if the first one is shut down. Accounts opened within the last 30 days can be subjected to longer holds on deposits under Regulation CC, so this would allow you to get a head start on that. My CU has always made my MO deposits available immediately, even when they've been well into five figures, but YMMV. I always deposit with a teller and always at the same branch so they know me well. I feel much safer giving the MO to a human than trusting an ATM when it's that much money involved, but also think it's a good idea to give them the opportunity to ask questions. This is pure speculation, but I'd guess that if you only deposit via ATM, especially if it's a new account that doesn't have an established pattern that they've already accepted, they might either think you want to avoid questions.

cbn42: Has this happened to anyone? I'm not an expert or anything, but it seems like reporting something like that to ChexSystems (customer deposited too many MO and we were suspicious) would be problematic under FCRA. If you have an unpaid negative balance or something like that, that's a concrete fact that is documentable if the customer disputes it. On the other hand, deposits being "suspicious" is a subjective judgment. As a non-lawyer, it seems like there might be a cause of action against a bank that pulled a move like that and prevented a customer from opening accounts anywhere else. Seems like the safe course of action for the bank if they think your deposits are suspicious but have no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing would be to close your accounts and file a SAR, but stop there.