The collapse of the credit market has reduced the availability of all kinds of loans, including those for financing higher education. Douglas C. Stebbins, a managing director of the Boston investment-banking firm Consensus Advisors, sees an opportunity for local banks to resume their long-lost role of providing student loans to their customers.

Writing in The Boston Globe, Mr. Stebbins notes that community banks have been pushed out of the student-loan market by national banks, which lump their loans together and then sell them, in a process called securitization, “to nameless, faceless pools of investors.”

Many of those investors were caught up in the subprime-lending downturn, and the secondary-loan market has dried up. “The government has stepped in to provide liquidity for federal student-loan programs,” Mr. Stebbins writes, “but with the average annual cost at $13,000 for an in-state university and $32,000 for a private college, there remains a sizable gap between what federal loans provide ($3,500 to $5,500 per year) and the true cost of an education.”

This is where community banks can step in and serve their local clientele, Mr. Stebbins says. “Excessive student indebtedness is serious, but most financial experts consider student loans to be ‘good’ debt since it is used to fund an investment that creates value over time,” he says, noting that a person with a bachelor’s degree earns an average of 60 percent more than someone with a high school diploma.

“If the societal good done in helping create new college graduates is not enough,” he writes, “the banks should consider that a better educated populace will be in a stronger position to pay back its snowmobile loans.” —Don Troop