Senator Stafford Dies

The Vermont senator the Stafford Student Loan was named for was 93.

He believed in the notion of low-interest loans” for education, and knew that if they were offered to “young people with no credit and no visible means of support, it would have to be through a special program,” said Ellin Nolan, who worked as a senior aide to Sen. Stafford and is now the president of Washington Partners, a consulting firm in the nation’s capital.

She also praised his ability to compromise, which is apt, since the student loan program itself sometimes seems like an uneasy (doomed?) compromise between the social good of sending kids to college, the profit motive of finance corporations, and the tendency of schools to charge a lot of tuition.