I appreciate that more readers are willing to tell their own stories. It's only through bringing this issue out into the open that we can begin to force lawmakers to address it. So far, the solutions offered by Congress have been to push students and their families toward more and more college loans, rather than making more federal grant aid available. And for parents already burdened with debt, and students who can't stomach the uncertainty of balancing great debt with the possibility of no good jobs, those solutions are insufficient.

The New York Times reported just three months ago that the Bush administration and Congress were "trying to head off any crisis by making sure that 'lenders of last resort' stand ready to take the place of companies that have left the federal loan program." I'd never heard this term "lenders of last resort," and I still don't have a good sense of what they are.

I have a pretty good sense of what middle-class folks are facing, though:

Parents will have to navigate unfamiliar and difficult terrain when it comes time to pay for college this year, with student loan companies in turmoil and banks tightening their standards and raising rates on other types of borrowing.

That means fewer sources of loans, higher interest rates, and more debt at the end of a college degree. It means middle-class families get shafted once again -- and I don't hear any solutions being offered by federal lawmakers or candidates.

But families often use a combination of resources to pay for college, drawing on savings, federal loans, bank loans and home loans to plug the gap between college costs and financial aid. Even if the government wards off problems in the credit markets and federal student loans are easily accessible, other sources of financing will become less accessible as consumers find themselves stretched thin and lenders get more choosy.

Do we not have a government protecting the economic interests of the middle-class anymore?

I talk to a lot of people who are in the same boat with this lady whose story was told in the New York Times report:

Turbulence in lending has complicated the efforts of people like Dawn R. Beaton of Mill Valley, Calif., to pay for her daughters’ education. A single mother earning less than $50,000 a year, she already has run into difficulty taking out a federal parent loan for her oldest daughter, Nicole, to attend a nearby community college. Her original lender pulled out of the market, and she is still waiting, months later, to hear from a replacement lender on that $5,000 request. She anticipates having to borrow about $10,000 to send her middle daughter to a private college in Ohio later this year.

“When I go to bed at night, I worry about it,” said Ms. Beaton, who is a financial manager for a vineyard.

“If you don’t have the money, there you are, in a serious, ulcer state. You feel inadequate.”

That's a $10,000 debt, not counting the interest that will accrue, added to the plate of a woman earning less than $50,000 a year. The math is simple: This is debt she'll be paying off for years, and nobody in government is interested in helping her. She's not alone.

According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 70 percent of parents surveyed were “very concerned” about how they would pay for college; only 6 percent were not concerned.

Based on my own interactions with people in my community, I'm surprised that the percentage of parents in the "very concerned" column isn't much higher than 70 percent. And I don't know anyone in the six percent category saying they're not concerned.

Still, the only solution our lawmakers offer to students and parents is to borrow more, more and more

Last year, students and their parents borrowed nearly $60 billion in federally guaranteed loans, a figure that has grown more than 6 percent annually over the last five years after taking into account inflation. In recent years, the growth rate has declined but may pick up as the economy slows and as other borrowing options fade.

Lawmakers in Washington have proposed increasing the amounts that students can borrow through federal programs and authorizing the Education Department to purchase federal loans, thereby providing banks with cash to make more loans. The House Education Committee approved legislation this week that would allow dependent students to borrow a total of $31,000 through federal programs to pay for their undergraduate education, up from $23,000 now.

The Times says that one narrow group of students can look forward to better and more financial aid this fall: ones attending the most expensive colleges in America.

Students attending several expensive and wealthy colleges will enjoy expanded financial aid, as those institutions move to replace need-based loans with grants. Harvard and Yale recently announced expansions of aid to families making as much as $150,000, displaying a degree of generosity that few institutions can match.

As for the rest of us and our families, we get to apply for private loans, "which do not have any government backing. The terms of private loans, like other consumer loans, vary depending on the credit histories of individual applicants and in some cases can top 20 percent."

In the last several months, rates on those loans have risen by nearly one percentage point, according to research by Mark Kantrowitz, who publishes the financial aid Web site FinAid.org. Lenders have also tightened their standards, making it costlier for those with weak credit histories to obtain loans.

Private loans have grown sharply in popularity over the last 10 years, as families have looked for ways to pay the difference between tuition, on the one hand, and their savings and federal loan options, on the other. Last year, according to the College Board, students took out more than $17 billion in private loans, up from just $1.6 billion a decade earlier.

Families also have closed the gap between college costs and federal loans by borrowing against their homes — and that is another option vanishing as house prices fall and lenders clamp down. Millions of homeowners now owe more than their houses are worth, leaving no equity to borrow against.

There is no data on how many parents may have used home equity loans to pay for higher education, researchers and aid administrators said, but there is no doubt many did, to take advantage of tax breaks and lower rates.

You know what I wonder?

I wonder about how much debt our own lawmakers assumed when they went to college, and how much they carried when they left college, and for how long. I wonder how they chose to pay off that debt, what sort of second and third jobs they took, or what sacrifices they made with their families to pay back their college loans. I wonder how many of them had the benefit of independently wealthy parents who could write checks for full tuition. And if any of them got federal grants for college, I wonder how they've worked while in office to make more grants available to more students, instead of loans.

Do you know how your member of Congress financed his or her college education? Has he or she ever talked about that? Why don't we ask those questions, and see what we find out? I bet that would make a great story for the New York Times.

I hope readers will continue to write about their own situations with college debt of theirs and their kids, too.