The student loan programs have a feature that most borrowers like and appreciate after leaving college: loan consolidations. Borrowers can consolidate all of their student loans once their six-month grace period has expired and their loans have entered repayment. What’s not to like about it? Students can get a better interest rate, a better payment structure, a single payment, and a longer payoff term, if they desire. Students save money when they consolidate their loans.

Congress wants to save students money too. Just not through student loan consolidations. Congress’ new plan effectively terminates a student’s ability to consolidate student loans. That’s an unusual approach for a body that claims to want to save students money, isn’t it?

Senator Kennedy and Co., don’t really want to you save money on your student loans. If they did, they would not have deliberately made it so difficult for students to consolidate loans. They say they want to save students money, but at the same time, they’ve taken away one of the best opportunities students have to save money on their student loans.

Loan consolidation is the one area of student loan lending where the borrower can really reduce not only his immediate payment, but also the amount of interest he pays over the lifetime of the loan. Consolidation offers the opportunity to adjust payments to fit the salary a graduate earns in his first job out of college.

Yes, the amount of money a student borrows to get through college has gone up substantially in the past several years, but ask yourself this: what does the principal sum have to do with the interest rate? Not much. Halving the interest rate isn’t going to change the amount a student borrows one iota. If Congress really wants to help students, they should work to decrease the amount of money a student has to borrow, and let them make the best deals they can to consolidate their loans after college.

Student borrowers have the ability to consolidate loans now, but if this program is signed into law, students can forget about consolidating loans to save money. This will increase the number of entities to which a student has to make payments, and will also increase the likelihood that a student will default on his loans.

If that’s not the kind of “help” you had in mind, tell your senators and Congressional representatives that you want real help in the form of increased tuition grants, and you want to preserve the ability to consolidate your student loans.