Doing the student loan shuffle

For students heading to college this fall, getting financial aid will be a good lesson in money management. It may be tricky to find loans, and the landscape seems to change from one week to the next.

For many borrowers, private loans will be hard to get. That's because several of the nation's largest banks have either shut down or significantly reduced their private student loan programs.

Last April, The Education Resources Institute, or TERI, -- the nation's largest nonprofit student loan guarantor -- filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, pulling even more private lenders out of the student loan market for the upcoming 2008-2009 school year. According to the Project on Student Debt, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit agency dedicated to curbing student loan debt, that could mean "bye-bye loan" for the 8 percent of all undergraduate students currently relying on private loans to foot some, if not all, of their college expenses.

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