Thankfully for all of us ISU students, a proposal by President Bush that would have changed the student loan program was scrapped Tuesday. The administration’s plan, which would have made interest rates for consolidated federal education loans variable, fell under harsh criticism from Democrats in Washington, forcing the administration to look elsewhere for places to save money.

As it stands now, college students can consolidate their student loans at a federally subsidized, fixed interest rate. This allows students who have built up thousands – if not tens of thousands – of dollars worth of federal loan money to repay the money monthly at an interest rate that does not change.

The Bush plan would have made the interest rate variable, changing from year to year. This would increase the repayment amount of the loan compared to a fixed rate.

We all could have suffered from this disastrous plan. Millions of college students across the country consolidate their student loans with that guaranteed, low interest rate.

So why would the Bush administration consider the plan in the first place? Surely they would have known it would spell disaster on the pocketbooks of college grads.

According to the Bush administration, there is a $1.3 billion deficit in the federal Pell Grant program, and the change to the student loan repayment program would have saved the government enough money to replenish that deficit. On the backs of college students who would have lost that fixed interest rate.

Now, the federal government says it will have to look elsewhere for ways to make up for the deficit in the Pell Grant program.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and other Washington Democrats rightfully argued to the Bush administration that eliminating the fixed interest rates would be penalizing poor and middle-class income students.

“We believe strongly that our government should make it easier for low and middle-income students to attend college, not harder and more costly,” Kennedy and 45 other Senate Democrats said in a letter to President Bush on Tuesday. “Therefore, if this proposal is put forward, we would strongly oppose it, and we urge your administration to withdraw this unwise plan.”

And that’s exactly what the White House did.

The tuition problems are not just an Iowa thing. States across the nation have been forced to raise tuition into the double digits in an effort to make up for budget shortfalls. Here at Iowa State, tuition raises seem to be a thing that will not cease in the future.

Because of this fact alone, the proposal by President Bush would have been disastrous. Imagine graduating college after four or five years of federal loans, only to find that during repayment, interest rates could change from year to year. It wouldn’t be a welcome event.

Thank goodness for the Democrats on this one.

editorialboard: Andrea Hauser, Tim Paluch, Michelle Kann, Charlie Weaver, Omar Tesdell