While President-elect Barack Obama is busy figuring out whom he wants to head the Education Department, the job’s current occupant is still offering up advice.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, addressing a department-sponsored financial-aid conference today at a casino in Las Vegas, said she planned “within the next few weeks” to submit recommendations for streamlining the process of delivering federal student aid.

Ms. Spellings said the key points of her recommendations would include making the federal financial-aid system as convenient as possible for students and families, and helping the neediest students first.

The secretary also said that student-aid eligibility “should be based simply on income and family size because those are reasonable, understandable variables.” And, Ms. Spellings said, students should know they’ll get the same amount of federal aid regardless of the college they choose, to help them with their bargaining power.

Ms. Spellings told the federally sponsored conference at Bally’s Las Vegas hotel and casino that she was preparing her recommendations on student aid at the request of Congress. At the same time, she said she hoped that Mr. Obama would follow her advice, noting that he paid off his own student loans in January 2004, 13 years after earning his law degree. —Paul Basken