Today the process of crafting a compromise bill looks very different, and the forces shaping the major law governing student aid have shifted in ways both significant and subtle. The changes have given new voices a say in policy decisions and made it harder for more-established players to ward off increased federal regulation and oversight that colleges oppose.

While legislators will still eventually meet to vote on a final compromise, the real negotiating is going on behind the scenes in closed "preconference" meetings among aides to top lawmakers. By the time Congress convenes a formal conference to finalize the legislation, later this month or next, these aides will have reconciled the majority of differences between the two chambers' bills, which would crack down on rising tuitions while imposing hundreds of new reporting requirements on colleges.

This power shift has given a small group of hard-working and intelligent but relatively inexperienced Congressional aides a huge amount of say over the shape of a bill that affects basically every college in the United States.

Colleges, meanwhile, are feeling left out. Lobbyists for the higher-education associations, some of whom have worked on multiple reauthorization bills, say aides are keeping things closer to the vest than usual, providing little feedback on lobbyists' suggestions and refusing to share copies of the comparative document. This arm's-length approach has made it harder for colleges to exert an influence on the bill, they say.

At the same time, new policy groups are gaining the ear of Congressional aides. While their legislative victories have so far been limited, these groups are changing the landscape of higher-education lobbying in Washington, while focusing Congressional attention on such issues as student-loan debt and conflicts of interest in the federal loan programs.

Just a Rubber Stamp?

The shift to a staff-driven conference occurred gradually, over the course of multiple reauthorization bills. In the 1980s and early 1990s, staff members met to hash out compromises in advance of a conference among legislators, but the aides typically left the most-contentious issues for the members themselves to consider. By 1998 the list of issues left for lawmakers had dwindled to less than a page, former staff members say. This time around, the aides are expected to leave only a handful of the stickiest issues for members to decide.

Critics of this change say it has meant that members of Congress have become little more than a rubber stamp for compromises crafted behind closed doors.

"It's purely political symbolism," says Thomas R. Wolanin, a retired Democratic aide who worked on five bills to reauthorize the Higher Education Act between 1972 and 1992. The law has been reauthorized seven times since it was enacted in 1965, most recently in 1998.

While aides are expected to represent their members' interests in preconference negotiations, letting staff members run the show can lead to "posturing" by aides with an ax to grind, Mr. Wolanin says.

"They can sit in the room and say 'My member really cares about this. I can't give this up.' But if you had an actual meeting with a member, you would find that they didn't really care about the issue," he says.

"The process," he adds, "is much less open and democratic."

At the same time, staff members are less experienced than in the past. Though Congressional offices have always had high turnover rates, the higher-education subcommittees were historically something of an exception. Mr. Wolanin spent more than 20 years on Capitol Hill, much of it as the staff director for the House Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education. David V. Evans, his counterpart on the Senate subcommittee, spent 19 years as an aide to Sen. Claiborne Pell, of Rhode Island, serving the senator from the day he was sworn in to the day he retired.

Today there are still some seasoned staff members in managerial jobs on the education committees, including several aides who have more than a decade of experience in federal education policy.

But with the exception of Beth Buehlmann, who works for the Senate education committee's top Republican, those veterans have largely stayed in the background for the drafting of this reauthorization legislation, handing responsibility for the bill to a crop of more-recent arrivals. None of these newer aides have worked on a higher-education reauthorization measure before, and nearly all of them arrived after the process of writing this one — which has dragged on for five years — was already well under way. Several aides who worked on the early stages of the bill have since left Capitol Hill.

Mr. Evans, who retired a decade ago, attributes the shorter tenures of House and Senate staff members to the financial lure of the private sector and changing attitudes toward public service. As the salary gap between the private and public sectors has grown, what was once a career is now seen as a steppingstone, he says.

"When I worked on the Hill, the Hill was a profession," he says. "I think now it's a way station, a stop between college and the private sector."

In some ways, inexperience can be an asset, lobbyists and aides say. Newer committee aides may be more open to new ideas than are staff members who have been through multiple renewal bills, and they may bring less bias to the process. Many of the recent bills enacted by Congress have been written by bright twentysomethings eager to cut their teeth on politics.

But greener aides may also find it harder to stand up to their bosses or say no to rank-and-file legislators who are pushing pet projects, former aides and lobbyists say. That may help explain why the House version of the legislation contains hundreds of new programs and rule changes requested by members of the education committee.

Other aides and lobbyists say the proliferation of programs in the House bill reflects the inclusive leadership style of Rep. George Miller, the committee chairman. While chairmen often farm out pieces of bills to spread the credit, and the work, former Congressional aides and lobbyists say Mr. Miller, a Democrat of California, has been unusually generous with rank-and-file members of his panel, giving them ownership of large chunks of the legislation and allowing them to insert ideas into the bill. Those insiders point out that some of the most unpopular provisions in the bill, such as the requirement that colleges notify students of an emergency within 30 minutes, came from rank-and-file members.

"Chairman Miller gave his guys, and the Republicans to a certain extent, a fairly long leash on issues important to them," said a former aide who asked not to be identified to protect committee staff members, who are under a gag order.

An Arm's-Length Approach

While the rank-and-file legislators are playing a bigger role than in the past, the college associations are feeling sidelined. Lobbyists say staff members have sought their input less often than in prior negotiations and are reaching out mainly to secure support for proposals that don't have unanimous support among legislators.

The lobbyists say that while aides are always willing to listen to their suggestions, the aides provide less feedback than they used to, leaving the lobbyists wondering if they are really being heard.

"We have lots of dialogue, but we rarely know if it's having an impact," said one lobbyist, who asked not to be named for fear of angering Congressional staff members. "We're constantly surprised by what they're doing."

Aides to the chairmen of the education committees say they have an open-door policy and have met with lobbyists many times. "We embrace the knowledge" that veteran lobbyists bring to the process, said one House Democratic aide. "We don't want to reinvent the wheel if we don't have to."

"But at the end of the day," the aide added, "we can take it or leave it."

The lobbyists' biggest complaint is that it has become harder for them to obtain advance copies of bills. They say they have often received drafts only hours before a committee or floor vote, leaving them little time to offer feedback or propose changes.

That frustrates longtime lobbyists who argue that the back and forth between Congress and representatives for colleges leads to richer, more workable legislation.

"I firmly believe that it results in better public policy, and I think we're poorer for not having that," said Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.

Former aides say staff members may be withholding documents from college lobbyists to keep their proposals from being pulled apart. Committee chairmen often keep drafts from their rank-and-file members for the same reason, knowing that the longer a bill is circulating, the more opportunity people have to find fault with it. Aides, though, say they share documents as soon as they are ready.

The arm's-length approach toward colleges probably has something to do with the way the higher-education establishment is viewed on Capitol Hill. Recent battles over college costs and accountability have strained the relationship between Congress and institutions, and some lawmakers and aides complain that higher-education advocates are averse to change.

Several aides said lobbyists spent more of their time resisting Congressional proposals than putting forward their own ideas. As an example, they cite cost provisions in the bill. While the associations fought a Congressional plan to create "watch lists" of the most expensive colleges, they did not offer another option until the bill had passed both chambers.

"They're really good about saying no," said one Senate Republican aide. "But they're bad about coming up with a viable alternative."

When lobbyists do offer revised language, "it's almost laughable," the aide said. "It takes the teeth" out of what Congress is trying to do.

The lobbyists say they are put on the defensive by Congress's attempts to intrude on colleges' academic and administrative affairs. As an example of federal overreaching, they point to provisions in the House-passed bill that would require colleges with the highest tuition growth to establish committees to identify "cost-reduction opportunities."

Privately, some of the lobbyists voice concerns that the current crop of aides, many of whom have backgrounds in elementary and secondary education, do not fully respect the autonomy that the nation's colleges have long enjoyed. At least one aide shares their concern.

"The lesson staff learned from No Child Left Behind is that we can demand certain info," said David P. Cleary, an aide to Sen. Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, a Republican and former education secretary and college president who has spoken out against increased federal regulation. "We've forgotten the good reasons higher education is different."

But some aides and even some lobbyists say the associations themselves may be partly to blame for their difficulties.

They say the college associations have sometimes been slow to respond to Congressional requests for support, even on ideas that came from the associations themselves. That happened recently with a proposal to change the way Congress calculates the rate at which students at a given institution default on their loans. Congressional aides agreed to the revision, but when some historically black colleges and universities came out against the change, saying it would hurt their institutions, the higher-education associations seemed to back away from the plan. Though the groups eventually sent a letter of support to Capitol Hill, some aides say they felt they had stuck their necks out for the lobbyists and been left hanging.

New Players

While the college associations are having a harder time making their voices heard on Capitol Hill, aides are reaching out to groups that represent students, like the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Democratic aides say their bosses are more preoccupied with the kinds of issues that students (or at least former students) care about, such as reducing student debt, than the Republicans were. (Other aides and lobbyists say Democrats are simply more focused on winning the youth vote.)

Some aides and lobbyists also credit Luke Swarthout, PIRG's lobbyist since 2004, for increasing the group's influence by bringing focus and stability to an organization that has historically suffered from frequent leadership changes.

Staff members are also turning to new policy groups and think tanks like the Project on Student Debt and the New America Foundation for feedback and guidance. One Senate Democratic aide described Robert M. Shireman, executive director of the Project on Student Debt, as a "go-to guy." Another described New America as a "helpful sounding board."

Though nominally nonpartisan, these new players have close ties to the Democratic establishment. Mr. Shireman was a senior education-policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, and Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy for the New America Foundation, was an aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate education committee. Those connections give the groups a certain credibility and sympathy in Democratic Congressional offices.

The groups also have the advantage of not being bound by a membership. While the college associations must seek to satisfy broad constituencies, Mr. Shireman "is a free agent," said Patricia Smith, a consultant for student-aid policy at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, who has worked in Washington for 30 years. "He doesn't have the baggage of members," she said.

That autonomy, Mr. Shireman says, has allowed him to "latch on to a few issues and hammer away." So far he has helped persuade Congress to include provisions in the higher-education bill to simplify the process of applying for federal student aid. He also won approval for a new income-based repayment plan for student borrowers as part of a different bill.

While Mr. Shireman consulted with the college associations before introducing his income-based repayment plan, he did not try to form a coalition with them and says he doubts he would have succeeded if he had.

"They have to negotiate with so many people that it's hard for them to show leadership," he said. "They end up with a least-common-denominator compromise on issues."

New America, which has taken a more combative approach than Mr. Shireman's with its sometimes-snarky blog, has had fewer clear legislative victories. In the reauthorization debate, it can claim credit only for an amendment to the House-passed bill that would require colleges to provide parents and students with nonbinding estimates of the cost of a degree. One Senate Republican aide dismissed the group, saying, "It's not like they're coming up with anything new. They're just stating a position loudly."

But supporters of the group say New America's blog created momentum for new conflict-of-interest rules in student lending and set the stage for a pilot program to test the use of auctions to set lender subsidies.

"They are so convinced that their policies are the right ones," said Brittny McCarthy, director of federal relations for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, who recently worked in Congress for Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat. "When you speak with that kind of authority, people listen to you."

Even with these changes and power shifts, the traditional college associations remain a powerful voice on Capitol Hill, former aides say. Most members of Congress have a college somewhere in their district, and they care deeply about keeping them happy.

"College presidents and faculty are important constituencies of all members of Congress," said Victor F. Klatt III, a former Republican aide. "Whether you agree with them or not, you have to deal with them because ultimately they have the power to gin up their members."