div style="text-align: justify;"JP Morgan is upgrading span style="font-weight: bold;"SLM Corp (NYSE:SLM)/span on a long-term view that its transition to primarily a loan servicer, as opposed to a lender, will lower interest rate and funding risks, thus improving earnings visibility. Firm emphasizes they are taking a longer view on this call, but with the successful inception of Straight-A funding greatly improving the liquidity profile and the recent award of the ED servicing contract, span style="font-weight: bold;"they think SLM is currently trading at about 50% of their conservative DCF estimate of $15/span. As such, they are upgrading the stock to OW (a 6 to 12-month rating), and setting a YE09 price target of $12, a 20% discount to our estimated DCF value.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"FFEL portfolio run-off alone worth $7.60/share./span SLM's $140B+ FFEL book is already in run-off, as SLM is expected to sell its ECASLA loans to ED this year ...