Congress is planning to gut the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) when it returns from summer break. Legislators claim that they’re going to increase the funding available to the neediest students, but really they’re playing a shell game. To increase the amount of Federal aid that’s disbursed in the form of Pell Grants, they need to de-fund other Federal programs that make aid available to other students. The bottom line for students is that finding financial aid is going to get harder.

Congress plans to take a big chunk of funding away from students who use the FFELP program. (Keep in mind that 8 out of 10 students use the FFELP loans to help pay for their education.) Yes, Virginia – you’re about to lose your student loans. But fear not, because the government has a plan.

The plan is to eliminate most of the private lenders from the student loan program, and to restrict private lending to no more than two lenders per state.  This “auction” system proposed by the Kennedy crowd has never been tried before, and promises to wreak havoc on the financial aid system that prospective college students and their families have been planning for years to use when the time to fund a child’s education comes along.

Who are these changes going to hurt the most? They’ll hurt the students who depend upon student loans to get through college. Sure, Congress talks about increasing the maximum Pell Grant, but guess what?  Increases in the cost of tuition will eat up most of the expanded grant amount. In fact, the Pell Grant awards haven’t been increased in several years, meaning that they no longer cover a significant percentage of a student’s college tuition, as they did when they were first introduced.

Increasing the Pell Grant amount by a few hundred dollars at the expense of a working student loan program isn’t the answer. Tell your representatives and senators that you need a working, dependable student loan program to finance college.