actually the reverse of that. They raised the rates after the tax cuts as part of budget reconciliation. How can you say that’s false?
To repeat, they didn’t raise interest rates. They merely changed interest rates on certain loans from variable to fixed. Since under the old regime interest rates were based on the formula described by iamthewalrus, these interest rates were headed up automatically (Congress did not have the power to raise or lower them). In fact, interest rates for people repaying them were going to be 7.1% and the evil GOP fixed them at 6.8%.
So if they’re actually taking in less money how is that part of a budget of the budget reconciliation plan, saving them billions of dollars?
Again, I’m pretty sure that the money paid into the system is rolled back into other student loans, so it has basically no effect on the deficit.
Even if this is wrong, the student loan provisions were only a minor part of the Deficit Reduction Act. The bulk of that were reductions in the increase that other programs (such as Medicaid) would experience.
I lucrative career in arbitrage awaits you. 
Question: If we increase the number of people who can buy a thing (college education, in this case) and if the supply of that thing is not increasing as fast as the increase in number of buyers, won’t the price of that thing go up?
This reminds me a lot of mortgage deductions. Does anyone really think that the price of a house doesn’t have factored into it the fact that people expect to be able to deduct the mortgage interest?
Apologies if I misinterpreted this (I’m a little unclear on the “they”), but your loans are fixed because you consolidated. Normally they’d be variable.
My wording wasn’t clear, but yes, I know. Well the 5% one was fixed from the outset, but the other one wasn’t (hence why I didn’t bother rolling it in with the consolidation, since the consolidated rate would have adjusted for the 5% and I would have ended up paying more over the long run because of reduced monthly payments).