Washington — The nation’s community colleges want the authority to deny some of their own students the right to take out a federally subsidized loan. The colleges think that some students won’t get jobs with salaries large enough to pay back the debt.

But the colleges don’t want banks to make that same decision.

Legislation announced this week by two Senate Democrats, Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Patty Murray of Washington, would require lenders that provide federally subsidized student loans to serve students at all colleges. Senators Dodd and Murray said they had proposed the bill because some loan companies had begun refusing to serve certain institutions, often community and technical colleges.

Officials of the American Association of Community Colleges said this week that they were stepping up efforts to win enactment of legislation that would give their colleges the authority to reduce the amounts that some students could borrow under the federal programs. The change is necessary because colleges now have no way to prevent a student from seeking a loan that doesn’t make economic sense, given the student’s long-term job prospects, said David S. Baime, the association’s vice president for government relations.

The Dodd-Murray bill makes sense, however, because loan companies have made “huge amounts of profits from the program” and sometimes reject students at a college simply because the institution’s loan volume doesn’t provide enough profits, Mr. Baime said. “It’s a very different dynamic,” he said.

Others in higher education aren’t so sure. The bill’s nondiscrimination language could help some colleges, but it would also prompt some lenders to quit the federal program altogether, said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. And a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities said his group had taken no position on the bill. —Paul Basken