The U.S. Senate’s only former college president said this morning that he was working with the secretary of education and Senate leaders to reduce the regulatory burden that the federal government places on colleges.

“We obviously need new regulations from time to time, as the recent student-loan controversy has shown,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and a former president of the University of Tennessee, in a telephone conversation with reporters today. “But at the same time, we ought to be getting rid of outdated regulations. That’s part of our oversight responsibility.”

Mr. Alexandar, a former education secretary himself, spoke a day after the Senate’s education committee approved a bill to reauthorize, or renew, the Higher Education Act. The senator said the legislation would double the number of federal regulations that colleges must comply with. He also said he planned to speak with the bill’s sponsors — Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Sen. Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming — about ways to make the bill less burdensome for colleges.

Senator Alexander said that he had written a provision in the bill that would require the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance to recommend how to reduce the amount of regulation contained in the Higher Education Act. —Kelly Field