I'm going to be really disappointed if there isn't a massive amount of outrage in response to this. According to a piece in Thursday's New York Times, students calling the financial aid office at some colleges may, unbeknownst to them, actually end up speaking with a representative from a student lending corporation. Their calls are automatically routed and answered as though they had reached the college's office. But they haven't. This is how a representative from Texas Tech, which engages in this practice, responded to questions:

Becky Wilson, director of financial aid at Texas Tech, defended the practice of routing student financial aid questions to Nelnet and said that the university was "trying to make the aid process as seamless as possible for students" so they do not have to deal with multiple people. She said that if call center workers identified themselves as Nelnet employees it would cause confusion ...

Great. And I suppose that disgraced Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget's practice of giving stock recommendations based on the encouragement (read: bonuses) provided by the company's investment banking arm made the process "seamless."

But New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sees through this. He said the call centers pose "an inherent conflict of interest" because "a self-interested lender is providing what is purported to be unbiased advice."

That's exactly the point. I'm certainly not saying that there is anything bad going on. I would never accuse banks or other companies in the financial services industry of not acting in their customers' best interests (although James Scurlock certainly would, and does, in his amazing book Maxed Out). But just as the not-necessarily corrupt relationship between investment banks and research analysts provides ample opportunity for unscrupulous conduct, it seems likely that this system of colleges forwarding calls to loan providers does as well.