The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is right to take on the poorly regulated, private student lending industry. Too often, college students are lured by schools or lenders into ruinously priced loans, even when they are eligible for affordable federal loans that offer hardship deferments and broad consumer protections.

Under a new initiative, the bureau is providing one-stop shopping for complaints on billing and collection disputes, and financial institutions will have to resolve complaints within 60 days. The bureau should require lenders and schools to make the differences between loans clear, and Congress should require private lenders to contact colleges before issuing loans to determine if student borrowers are eligible for federal loans. The schools should then steer students toward the federal program.

Students who borrow privately often wrongly assume that private and government loans function in the same way. They don’t. Currently, for example, the interest rate on most federal student loans is capped at 6.8 percent. Interest on private loans is typically uncapped, with variable rates that can start at 15 percent or higher, according to a 2011 report by the Institute for College Access and Success, a research group that tracks student debt. The data on private loans is incomplete, but it suggests that students who borrow this way are more at risk of default. Federal loans also allow borrowers who lose their jobs to defer payment or to pay smaller amounts tied to their incomes. Private lenders offer fewer such protections.

Most students who take out high-cost private loans do so even though they are eligible for federal loans. According to the study, many schools do an inadequate job of counseling students about the problem and some even package risky private loans with their aid offers. Up to now, students who ran into abusive lenders or slipshod servicing got little help even if they had the ability to navigate among the several federal agencies that regulate banks. If the consumer bureau does its job properly, bad lenders will be more quickly called to account.