Now we see one of the reasons the Senate is including student loans in reconciliation — they don’t want to tax rich people (as the House does) so they’re stealing the money from community colleges. The Senate HELP Committee is currently writing the student loan reconciliation bill that the House has to pass (the House [...]

Count me with Tim Ranzetta — student loan reform was D-E-A-D dead earlier this week, as both Congress and the White House were nervous about losing on the health care bill if student lending was included in reconciliation. But last night, Conrad backtracked from the position he’d expressed only that morning. And today, it was [...]

With little public notice or fanfare, the federal government has been providing financial institutions involved in the student loan business with a bailout projected to be over $100 billion: 2007-2008 2008-2009 2009-2010 TOTAL Loan Purchase Commitment Program $997,945,088 $48,538,600,137 $2,540,422,115 $52,076,967,340.00 Loan Participation Purchase Program $33,359,067,388 $25,565,704,156 $58,924,771,544.00 Asset-Backed Commercial Paper $31,540,088,059 $31,540,088,059.00 This makes [...]

Student loan lobbyists have been distributing a memo around Capitol Hill, with the misleading claim that if the FFEL program is eliminated in favor of direct lending, all of these jobs in the industry will be lost.

The bottom line: job losses in a tough economy are nothing to treat lightly, but the claims made by lobbyists don’t hold to close scrutiny, and the jobs impact must be weighed against the number of students currently enrolled in each state if money that could be going to schools is instead propping up a costly and unnecessary industry that is surviving only because of government subsidy.

Find out more about the Students, Not Banks campaign and sign the petition.