On July 1, interest rates on a key federal student loan are set to double, and, for once, the White House and House Republicans might reach a compromise to avoid the hike. Unfortunately, students might be better off if they didn't: Many activists say they'd prefer no deal at all to the one on the table. Short-term patches have become routine in a Washington seemingly incapable of permanent solutions, but in this case a patch may be the answer. On student loans, the best thing to come of the next four weeks would be a measure that buys more time.

The administration and House Republicans agree that the interest rate on loans—including but not limited to the most common variety, Stafford Loans, which face the July 1 increase—should rise and fall with the economy instead of being set at a fixed rate by Congress, as things currently stand. House Democrats lowered the rate on subsidized Stafford Loans to its current level of 3.4 percent in 2008, intending it to be a temporary measure; unsurprisingly, it was too popular to do away with easily, and now Democrats and Republicans fight almost annually over how to adjust it. Both the Obama administration and House Republicans propose a "variable interest rate approach," which would peg the student loan rate to the performance of the ten-year Treasury Note, plus a few percentage points. “When you start out with the fact that the president himself talked about a variable interest rate approach, and the House talked about a variable interest rate approach, it appears to me we’re quibbling about details,” said Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

Here's the problem from the student debtors' perspective: The president's plan doesn't cap the rates, which means they could spike to unprecedented heights as the economy recovers. (Right now, the ten-year note pays interest at around two percent, but before the recession it was closer to five. Even at that unremarkable level, figuring in the president's "add-on"—which would put the rate 0.93 to 3.93 percentage points above that of the ten-year note, depending on the type of loan—pushes students nearly to or over the dreaded 6.8 percent fixed rate.) The plan that passed the House last week, written by Representative John Kline, caps rates at a steep 8.5 percent. (Keep in mind that the current rate has already produced record levels of delinquincy—the Department of Education announced last week that 11 percent of loans were 90 days or more past due.) Student advocates are grumbling that they’ll be better off in the long run if the rate doubles. A flat 6.8 percent rate beats hitting an 8.5 percent ceiling—or not having a ceiling at all.

Preferring uncertainty to an irremediably bad accord, students—and some leading Democrats—are pinning their hopes on what looks, at the outset, like the least ambitous bill in the Senate: a two-year extension of the current rate. “Comprehensive student loan reform is going to take time and we have to get it right. We definitely cannot screw it up,” said Chris Lindstrom, Higher Education Program Director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “Rallying around another short term fix doesn’t feel satisfying or like we’re really mustering the best solution to the problem, but I’ve quickly gotten over that feeling.”

Student groups have written letters to Obama expressing the same sentiment: Unless he's prepared to overhaul his proposal before July 1, they need more time to convince him that he should. "While the President’s budget keeps rates low in the near term, we’re disappointed that it risks sky-high interest rates in the long term... Without a cap, this proposal falls far short of the comprehensive reform to student loans that we need," the youth group Rock the Vote wrote in April. "We look forward to working with the President on a more tenable solution to keep rates low, be it a long-term solution that actually protects future borrowers, or a short-term action that allows time to develop a long term plan."