The nation’s student-loan companies, fighting plans in Congress for an auction-based loan system, are proposing a classic Washington way to defeat an idea: Study it.

Four associations representing student-aid lenders and related companies wrote today to Congressional leaders, saying that a study of the auction idea, as much as they detested it, would be preferable to legislation now in Congress that would begin holding auctions on a trial basis.

“We do not make this recommendation lightly,” the associations wrote in a letter to members of the House and Senate education committees. The groups were the Consumer Bankers Association, the Education Finance Council, the National Council of Higher Education Loan Programs, and the Student Loan Servicing Alliance.

“While we recognize that there is Congressional interest in a pilot auction program, we strongly believe that a new auction study must occur, and its results taken into account, before Congress authorizes the initiation of a pilot auction project,” the associations said in their letter. “Such a study should involve representatives of schools, students, parents, lenders, servicers, and guarantors.”

Congress now votes on the levels of subsidy that are given to lenders participating in the federally guaranteed student-loan program. Advocates of an auction argue that it would use market mechanisms, rather than estimates by Congress, to set profit margins in the student-loan industry. Critics, including most lenders, argue that an auction would limit student choice to the lenders that emerged victorious in the government-run auction process. —Paul Basken