My morning ritual combines breakfast and channel surfing, to get a flavor of what we used to call the “mass media” considers newsworthy. CNN featured a bunch of talking heads commenting on today’s confirmation hearings of Arne Duncan, the Secretary-designate of Education. CNBC’s pundits were weighing President Bush’s assertion that credit markets have started to thaw. Student loans emerged from both discussions, which grabbed my attention, as my client American Student Assistance (ASA) is one of the DOE’s designated administrators of the federal student loan program. ASA has put forth a proposal for federal student loan reform, and while it doesn’t cure all of what ails higher education, it is refreshing in its forthright assessment of the status quo, and what we can do about it.

That’s more than I can say for the pundits on either CNN or CNBC. Students and families are getting squeezed on all sides by a system tied in the knots of its own conundrums. College is expensive – way too expensive for most families. Loans, especially private loans, are hard to come by and onerous to service. Even if your lender is on the up and up, interest rates are high, repayment options are limited, and students face the prospect of spending most of their working lives paying off their higher education loans.

Yet, when you ask your typical pundit how we get out of this bottleneck, you’re likely to hear the change of subject two-step: “Well, let me just take a step back here and say that I think it’s very important to bring educators into this discussion….” or “I know we all share a concern about the high cost of college, and I think the states need to do their part….” Buck passing at its very “best.”

ASA, by contrast, tells it like it is. Whatever outcome of the college affordability debate, or of the credit crunch, the U.S. higher education system will be financed by debt for the foreseeable future. Our system encourages all qualified students to pursue higher education; government gives students access to that higher education primarily through loans, as opposed to grants. Loans and other non-grant aid today make up 57 percent of all federal funding for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students.

In our debt-driven model of higher education, student loan borrowers clearly have a repayment obligation, but government and society have an obligation as well, not only to facilitate access to sound loans, but also to help borrowers manage their debt over the life of those loans. The federal student loan system does not recognize today’s student loan borrower as a consumer with a right to assistance in understanding debt and managing it over the long term. In the rush to pass the higher education cost buck, it’s the student who loses out – and that shouldn’t be.