As Kevin noted earlier, a few major publications are starting to glom onto the fact that health care’s slow progress has basically stalled the pending legislation to revamp the federal student loan programs. The latest entrant is the New York Times, which in a nice piece of symmetry, both ended and began this week with a late-to-the-party education story. (See Eduwonk’s reference to “Rip Van” Dillon” for the first piece on ESEA reauthorization here).

What’s always interesting to see in these stories is who the reporter turns to in order to present the issue. For example, here’s a list of the people quoted in the Times story:

• Unnamed House and Senate aides
• Education Secretary Arne Duncan
• Jack Remondi, Sallie Mae CEO
• Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton staffer and industry lobbyist
• Barack Obama
• House Ed Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.)
• Caesar Storlazzi, the Yale chief financial aid officer

Here’s the same lineup for the Washington Post’s story on the matter from last week:

• Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chair of the HELP Committee
• Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.),  former education secretary
• Bob Shireman, deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Education
• Sarah Bauder, financial aid director at the University of Maryland, College Park

Notice anyone missing? How about one of the million or so additional students that are expected to benefit from having more money available for Pell Grants? Or the even larger number of students who would benefit from the federal government’s first major investments in college completion efforts? I’ll let them off the hook for not talking to the toddlers that would benefit from the billions of dollars directed toward early childhood education, but you get the idea.

Instead, we get comments such as the one that Kevin mentioned from Yale, where a financial aid administrator complains about being strong-armed by the government or claims they personally get better deals from the lenders. I understand that the aid administrators are the ones who have to run these programs at the campus level, but it seems ridiculous that concerns about this program should be dictated by what is more convenient for the financial aid office. (Higher Ed Watch has a hilarious satire of this issue here.)

From what aid administrators say, you would think that they are doing the government a favor by taking in billions of dollars  each year in what amounts to a grant program for the school since they don’t have to repay any loans.

But the fact of the matter is that every grant program involves a certain amount of give and take. For example, when a foundation gives a non-profit organization a grant, they require interim reports, somewhat regular phone calls, and deliverables to show that the money does not get wasted. The government requires far less than that. It makes institutions report some figures into a few data sets here and there and calculate a few graduation rates, but that’s it. There are no deliverables. They don’t have to show that they put the money to good use by giving students a good education. And now the aid office is going to complain that the government tells them how they have to receive the billions of dollars in aid they get every year—money that is absolutely essential for the continued operation of every school that does not have a sizeable endowment.

So what about the claim put forth by the Yale aid official that he preferred the bank-based program because lenders gave better prices and services? Turning to Yale for this perspective is quite misleading. It’s one of the top five schools in the country and it has a high price tag. The default risk of these students is incredibly low so lenders can afford to throw any number of perks at the school and then sit back and collect federal subsidies on the loans.

Instead, I’d be curious to see how Southern Connecticut State University feels about the prices it gets. I’d imagine that all the lenders beating a path to Yale’s door may not be taking the three mile detour to offer similarly great deals. Or what about a smaller rural community college that only has a few borrowers each year?

Turning the student loan discussion into a question of who gets the best deal at the elite colleges completely undermines the point of the program as something that is supposed to equally help prospective students meet their tuition bills. Rather than listening to Yale complain about potentially losing some benefits, I’d personally rather hear from the student with a Pell Grant at a non-selective school that really could use that additional couple of hundred dollars a year.