What do Ted Kennedy and President Bush have in common?

Both are making the multibillion-dollar student loan industry incredibly nervous.

Both want to slice the taxpayer subsidies the industry enjoys - subsidies that make student loans "the second most profitable business for banks, after credit cards," says Kennedy.

Both say students will benefit.

While Kennedy and Bush come at it from different angles, their simultaneous attacks on the student loan industry are extraordinary, say experts in student lending, some of whom are displeased, others ecstatic at the prospect of a shakeup...

From a political perspective, these are some of the biggest changes contemplated since Democrats retook Congress. Democrats tried to shake up the loan business for years but were thwarted by the Republican majority, which received most of the political donations given by large lenders...

"It's a different game today," said Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy at a Washington think tank, the New America Foundation, and a former education adviser to Kennedy, who chairs the Senate education committee. "Not just because there's a Democratically controlled Congress, but because they've been triangulated by the president..."

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