Campus leaders are already responding with actions and plans to proposals in Congress that would eliminate roughly $10.8 billion from the federal student loan program.
Chancellor for the Lexington Campus Elisabeth Zinser sent a letter to Kentucky's two U.S. Senators, Wendell Ford and Mitchell McConnell, protesting the proposals, said Jack Blanton, vice chancellor for administration.
Cost-cutting bills in both the House and Senate were approved in committees by party line last week.
According to the Senate proposal, universities could be levied a .85 percent fee on its total student loan volume.
The Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee also voted for a cap on the Direct Lending program, which would cut the system in half.
The House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee voted to cut the Direct Lending program entirely.
Other proposals include scrapping the six-month, interest-free grace period for students and cuts on loans to parents.
Besides the cuts on the Direct Lending program, the fee on universities would cost the UK University System roughly $425,000. That amount could be indirectly forwarded to students through a small tuition increase, Blanton said.
Zinser's letter is only a start. A postal outcry from students and their parents would raise the attention of Kentucky's two senators, Blanton said.
If 1,000, hand-written pieces of mail were to pile up on either senator's desks, Blanton predicted that that would sway the legislator's vote.
"That will have much more input than some administrator," Blanton said.
But it's not only the administration fighting the proposed cuts.
The Student Government Association is making plans to protest the Republican proposals, Vice President Heather Hennel said.
"The students can't bear every burden passed onto them," she said last week. "In the past year, everything has increased, increased, increased, but where are our benefits?"
She cited annual tuition increases proposed by the Council on Higher Education since 1992 and a new $5 charge from the UK Athletics Association for basketball and 1996 football tickets as examples.
"We're going to have to address the issue in some way," Hennel said.
That could mean a campus-wide class walkout similar to the one last November, she said, when SGA officials protested an expected tuition increase.
In the event, students stormed the Administration Building and stopped traffic across South Limestone for 20 minutes.
"I don't know if that's what we're going to do," Hennel said. Members of SGA's executive branch will meet to decide what would be most effective, she said.
Meanwhile, national student lobbyists, like UK senior Alison Crabtree, are networking updated information on the proposals to colleges nationwide, Crabtree said last week.
"Most of this, first of all, is going to be vetoed," Crabtree said, referring to President Clinton's promise a few weeks ago at a speech she attended at the University of Illinois at Carbondale.
The Alliance to Save Student Aid, a network of campus activists nationwide, will hold an awareness drive on campus next week, Crabtree said.