"The telephone number looks like any other university extension. And when students call with questions about financial aid, the recorded voice at the other end says, 'Thank you for calling Texas Tech University's Student Financial Center.'

But what is remarkable about the center is not so much that it is actually located hundreds of miles away from Texas Tech's Lubbock campus. It's that the people giving advice are not university employees at all - instead they work for Nelnet, a company that made more than $68 million last year off of student loans.

...Texas Tech, which defends the arrangement as beneficial to students, is hardly alone. Nelnet says its Texas call center located in Bryan and another in Indianapolis provide advice on behalf of about 10 different colleges; one is Wayne State University in Detroit. Pace University and Mercy College in New York City and its suburbs are among the roughly 20 institutions that use call centers operated by Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student loan company.

Documents obtained by the New York attorney general's office show, according to officials, that some contracts between the colleges and the lenders require the call center staffers to identify themselves as part of the university. Loan company officials interviewed all declined to say which colleges use their centers.

...The relationships between loan companies and universities are increasingly coming under attack by federal and state officials as tuition continues to rise and students are accumulating heavy debt loads to pay for college. In 2006, students borrowed about $85 billion, according to the College Board. "

"Many colleges route student calls to representatives of loan companies who pretend to work for the college but who actually have a vested interest in selling the costliest possible loans.

Colleges portray this as a harmless, cost-saving convenience that allows them to serve students without hiring more staff members. But it is part of a troubling - and possibly illegal - process that finds colleges steering students to "preferred lenders" in exchange for kickbacks based on volume.

...Some financial aid officers argue that students are getting the best possible loan rates. That seems dubious, given that "preferred lender" agreements uncovered by prosecutors are based on the payments made to the colleges and make no mention of the interest rates the students will be charged. Deceptive packaging is also a problem. Some lenders name their loans after colleges and universities and use college mascots and logos on Internet sites and correspondence.

The courts will decide if the preferred lender agreements are legal. But it is clear that they are unethical and potentially damaging to students who rely on their colleges for objective information."

Still captive to the campus craziness let loose during the Sixties, the college-educated women of the Seventies were distinctively permissive in their thinking about divorce.   But decades of hard experience have apparently sobered up the nation's well-educated females.  According to a study recently published by researchers at the University of Maryland, American women with a four-year college degree have become decidedly more conservative in their attitudes toward divorce.

Examining national survey data collected between 1974 and 2002, the authors of the new study detect what they characterize as an "educational crossover in divorce attitudes."  Looking at data from the Seventies, the Maryland scholars find that "of all education groups of U.S. women aged 25-39, four-year college graduates had the least restrictive attitudes toward divorce."  However, things had decidedly changed a quarter century later: "by the 2000 and 2002 interviews, four-year college graduates had the most restrictive attitudes [toward divorce]."  In this decisive turn against divorce, the researchers see "a welcome trend to the extent that it strengthens marriages for families with highly educated parents."

The authors of the new study interpret their findings in the light of recent reports that during the Nineties "denial and happy talk about the consequences of nuclear family decline became decidedly less widespread, [and] concern and even alarm became much more common."  Perhaps, the researchers acknowledge, "a shift back to conservative attitudes is under way, portending significant change in family behaviors and outcome." 

During the last three decades, however, less-educated American women have been moving in the other direction.  "Women with no high school diplomas," the researchers observe, "have moved from being essentially neutral to having the least restrictive attitudes toward divorce."  This trend would appear to be much less healthy and far less welcome than the wedlock-reinforcing trend evident among well-educated women.   

That "more socially traditional values" have reasserted themselves among college-educated women is quite apparent in the researchers' data.  Just the opposite has been taking place among the nation's least-educated women.  In trying to identify the reasons that poorly educated women are now distinctively permissive in their marital attitudes, the researchers highlight the effects of  "never-married motherhood."  During the period studied by the researchers, the percentage of never-married college-educated women who had borne a child out of wedlock remained low: 0% in 1974-78; 3% in 1998-2002.  In contrast, during the same period, a sharply rising percentage of never-married women without college degrees had borne a child out of wedlock: 2% in 1974-78; 16% in 1998-2002.  Apparently, the epidemic of out-of-wedlock childbearing among poorly educated women has eroded their willingness to support lasting matrimony as a social ideal.

The researchers say nothing at all about how highly educated and highly visible women used their cultural bully pulpits for decades to spread permissive attitudes among the poorly educated women who looked up to them. Well-educated women may have come to their senses, but can they now reverse the effects of the mischief previously worked upon the less-educated?