Washington — The Bush administration announced a plan last week to provide federal financial assistance to loan companies, to help ensure continued student access to government-subsidized loans. It apparently won’t be enough, however, to ensure that some students keep their lenders.

Citibank, one of the nation’s largest providers of student loans, has told a series of colleges in recent days that it won’t be doing business with them any longer.

The bank’s student-lending division, the Student Loan Corporation, said in a statement that it was “suspending lending at certain schools where we anticipate processing minimal loan volume. We have also temporarily suspended lending at schools which tend to have loans with lower balances and shorter periods over which we earn interest.”

Citibank wouldn’t say how many colleges its decision affected. Financial-aid directors at several colleges have been voicing their complaints and confusion today about the decision, saying that in some cases Citibank is abandoning institutions with above-average borrower-repayment rates.

“Whether this decision comes back to bite them in the long term, they’ve made a short-term business decision to lower costs and increase profitability,” Samuel F. Collie, the interim financial-aid director at Eastern Oregon University, wrote to his colleagues on an electronic bulletin board. “An unintended consequence may be that any ‘good will’ on their books will suffer a serious writedown in fiscal ’08.” —Paul Basken