This article reports that if there's a silver lining in the dark cloud hanging over campus budgets, it may be that colleges' investment losses could ease Congress's demands for mandatory endowment payouts, at least in the short term. In part that's because colleges tend to spend greater portions of their assets when endowments dip, even if overall…

Several months into a credit crunch that has led at least 20 lenders to leave the guaranteed loan program or suspend their lending operations, lawmakers have begun to respond with a sense of urgency, even as they seek to reassure students and parents that a crisis is unlikely and that federal student loans will still be available this fall. In the…