Part of the reason that so many students have graduated from college in the past 15 years is that FFELP lenders were there to take up the funding slack that Congress would not, could not or did not. Far more money was available for students through the private lenders than Congress ever bothered to come up with.

While Congress was apparently distracted with much more important matters, private lenders soldiered on. They developed unique and innovative lending products, ensuring that people who want to attend college have the money to do so. In addition, the FFELP lenders have competed with each other to offer borrowers the best deal possible.

This willingness to take up the matter where Congress left off (fifteen years ago) has now earned the ire of Congress, and the good men and women on the Hill want to make sure that you newly minted voters aren’t somehow left with the erroneous impression that they haven’t been paying attention to the problems of student borrowers in the past fifteen years.

Your Congressional representatives would hate to have you believe that they don’t really care about how you’re going to pay for college just because they capped the amount of Federal financial aid you could receive for fifteen years running while the cost of tuition exploded. They wouldn’t want you to come away from this issue with the thought that perhaps if Congress had been more responsible about financial aid funding in the past fifteen years that you wouldn’t be carrying as much debt upon graduation.

You see, your student loan balances are really not their fault. Congressional Democrats want you to believe they’re the fault of the people who actually loaned you the money to go to college in the first place. After all, if the FFELP lenders hadn’t loaned you the money to go to college, you wouldn’t have all of this student loan debt, right? The fact that you wouldn’t be going to college if you had to rely on Congress to help you out is neither here nor there.

Congress has proven itself to be rather undependable when it comes to financing student loans. The best they’ve managed to come up with is a broken Federal loan program, currently mired in a debt of more than $16 billion, in which most colleges and universities won’t participate. They are just now revisiting the cost of higher education, after 15 years of inattention.

Tell your representatives in Congress that if they aren’t going to do anything about the high cost of college tuition, you don’t want to rely on them to provide adequate funding for your college education. Tell them to restore the FFEL program and leave the business of lending to the lenders.