however, if you did not know beforehand about the many differences between loans you will not know if you have qualified for a costly loan option or if there is another loan option that can be most suited for you.

If you are going to take student loans without understanding how to manage them, in the long run it can lead to credit score issues in the future.  If you must avoid these situations in the future you will have to understand the kind of student loans you are committing yourself to.
There are various kinds of student loans and there are many varieties of lenders that are providing with lot of different loans with different interest rates that can confuse you due to the many numbers of offers that you might receive. When you understand prior to getting the student loans about why one kind of student loans differ from the other, you will be in a better position to decide on how to proceed when you are applying for your student loan in a way to help yourself fund your college studies.
Not all student loans are provided by private parties. There are student loans provided by the government agencies.  The student loans can be either directly from the federal body or it can be from the administration of particular states.

The federal student loans also known as the direct loans are the most known ones.
If you should know if you will qualify for a federal student loan, you will have to check with the appropriate government agency about the requirements for the direct loans and you must in turn verify for the kind of direct loans you actually qualify for. 

Like many other loans there are many different types of direct loans also.  Most of the student loans are given according to the needs of the applicant’s needs, rather than a first come, first served basis.
There are private student loans that are given by non-profit lending institutions.  These loans are usually higher in value than what you can get from the direct loan, in that they can be used to pay for additional educational expenses that the federal government student loans will not offer to lend for.