The Senate and the House are wrestling with the problem of reconciling two completely incompatible student loan lending bills. The House has made promises that the Senate doesn’t want to deliver, and the Senate has made promises that the White House doesn’t support. Stuck in the middle are student loan borrowers who might likely end up with nothing of value, and are currently at risk of losing the stable student loan system they’ve enjoyed for more than 40 years.

Congress doesn’t seem to plan ahead, so both of these bills are retroactive to July 1 of this year. If one of these disasters, or some mangled mixture of the two, survives the reconciliation process, all of the changes in the bill must somehow magically take effect immediately.

This includes the interest rate reduction that the House has promised (if it survives, that is), the auction system that Senator Kennedy and Company have dreamed up, and the opposing provisions of the Star Amendment and the Sunshine Act.

Fall semester classes will start in less than a month and this issue is nowhere near a done deal. With this proposed mess waiting in the wings, no student can be sure that his or her college finances are stable for the coming academic year.

At least with the FFELP lending program, students know immediately how much money they have, and they can count on the money being there. These so-called reforms introduced by the 110th Congress are not reforms at all: they’re chaos. The Department of Education is suddenly supposed to carry out a system of auctions to determine which lenders can participate in the program and which can’t, retroactive to July 1 of this year?

The Congressional Democrats’ ham-handed attempt to prove to the electorate that they have the ability to do something will only result in utter chaos for the student participants in the student loan program. Worse, it will also reduce to rubble the budgets of the colleges and universities that rely on the funds they receive in a timely way from the FFELP lenders.

The last time the Congress monkeyed around with student loan lending via the FDLP, the federal loan payments were so late that Congress had to pass an emergency spending measure to keep thousands of students from being dis-enrolled from their institutions for non-payment. Is this really the kind of stability you’re looking for? This is exactly the kind of stability you’re going to get if Congress gets its way.

Tell your Senators that you don’t want the stability of the current system jeopardized so that they can score a few meaningless points with the electorate. Let them know that the electorate will be far more concerned about the havoc that these changes will wreak on the student financial aid system.

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