Washington — Two months ago, as a sense of crisis descended upon the student-loan industry, JP Morgan Chase & Company stood up and said that it not only would continue to supply government-backed loans, but would do so at a discount.

“It sounds so self-serving,” a company spokesman, Thomas A. Kelly, said at the time, “but if you are doing business with a major bank doing student lending, they’re going to be there tomorrow.”

That was two months ago.

Last week the bank’s student-loan division, Chase Education Finance, announced that because of higher financing costs and lower federal subsidy rates, it would no longer offer government-backed loans at colleges with high-risk borrowers.

And today officials at Chase are telephoning the colleges that the bank is still willing to serve to tell them that the discounts it promised in February to maintain — reimbursing students for both the borrower origination fee and the default fee that are required under the federal program — will no longer be paid by Chase on the borrower’s behalf.

Chase provided about $3-billion in federally guaranteed student loans this academic year, the fourth-largest supplier in the government-subsidized program. Mr. Kelly said in February that Chase and other large banks could afford to stay in the program, and even offer discounts, at a time when other lenders were leaving because banks had their own customer deposits and therefore did not need to rely on securities or other forms of outside investment to finance their student lending.

Education Department officials, including the secretary, Margaret Spellings, have cited such assurances from Chase as evidence that the government-backed student-loan program should have enough willing participants this coming academic year.

Mr. Kelly said today, however, that he did not expect Chase to grow beyond the level of student lending it did this year.

“We’re still going to be there,” Mr. Kelly said today, “for as many people as we can afford to do.” —Paul Basken