After months of organizing, lobbying, and just plain waiting, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act — SAFRA — passed yesterday night. It has been sent to President Obama for his signature.

SAFRA will streamline and simplify the federal student loan program by eliminating banks as go-betweens. The reform’s savings over the next ten years are estimated at $61 billion — or, as one activist Twitterer put it last night, “61 + nine zeros.” The bulk of that money will go to increases in Pell Grants and other education initiatives, with some $20 billion going to deficit reduction.

For a taste of the jubilation with which this vote has been greeted in the policy-geek wing of the student activist movement, check out the #cuzSAFRApassed hashtag on Twitter.

The University of California Regents enter the third day of their March meeting this morning, and though the meet hasn’t been met by the kind of huge mass protests that accompanied last November’s fee hikes, it has produced quite a bit of news — and some impressive new student mobilization.

On Tuesday, the Regents heard proposals for changes to university policy that would cut costs and increase revenue, many of which would likely provoke intense student opposition if implemented. The ideas put forward ranged from new tuition hikes and a doubling of out-of-state enrollment to the creation of a three-year undergraduate degree path. Students and workers weighed in on the changes in statements to the board, and “erupted in chants and yelling” at the end of the public comment period.

The Regents will receive formal recommendations on these issues at their July meeting.

Yesterday the Regents discussed — and heard student opinions on — the system’s recent wave of bias crimes and the underlying questions of campus climate and demographics. UC President Mark Yudof endorsed admissions reform in the course of that discussion, calling for a so-called “holistic” admissions approach, in which an applicant’s life experiences are taken into account, to be mandated on every campus. UC San Diego, which has a student body which is just 1.6% black, and which has seen a series of racist incidents in recent months, is one of the campuses that does not presently use a holistic approach.

On tuition, the Regents endorsed a policy “clarification” that asserts their right to set student fees at any level they want. (The student Regent was the only vote in opposition to this motion.) The rumored proposal to eliminate the word “public” from professional schools’ tuition policies was not put forward, but Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng says it’s his understanding that it will be on the agenda of the Regents’ next meeting.

Cheng has been liveblogging the entire meeting, by the way, and his reports are well worth reading. In addition, several student activists have done an amazing job livetweeting the proceedings, either in person or via streamed video.

With the passage of health care reform and the SAFRA student aid package in the House of Representatives on Sunday night, the two initiatives move to the Senate for what could be final approval.

The Washington Post has an article out this morning about where the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) stands, and it’s got mostly good news for supporters of the measure. A spokesman for Senator Ben Nelson (D-FL), a SAFRA skeptic, is quoted as saying that “it looks like” student loan reform is “in the health-care and education legislation to stay.” The Post itself says that “Democratic support for the bill appears to be solidifying in the Senate, even among senators who have expressed concerns about the lending overhaul.”

Debate in the Senate on health care and SAFRA, which are being voted on under special rules as part of a “reconciliation” budget package, began yesterday. Senate Democrats are hoping to bring the bill to a final vote by the end of the week, though if any changes are made in the Senate, those changes would be kicked back to the House for that body’s approval.

Thursday Morning Update | So … yep. The bill is going back to the House.

Late last night, Senate Republicans identified two glitches in the House HCR/SAFRA bill, and won a ruling from the parliamentarian that those glitches will have to be fixed before the bill becomes a law. What that means is that when the Senate passes its version of the bill, it will make those changes, and that the House will then have to take up the bill again to amend it to match.

On its own, this development is unlikely to mean much. Neither of the changes the Senate will be making are of any great significance, and there’s no reason to believe that the House won’t just pass them by the same margins it passed the original bill.

One piece of the equation does shift slightly, though, as the Republicans now have a new argument to use in pushing for bigger changes to the bill. Since the reforms are going back to the House anyway, they’re saying, why not make some substantive improvements? But the Senate rejected twenty-nine Republican amendments yesterday, and there’s no indication in this morning’s reporting that the Democrats are likely to rise to the bait.

The Senate plans to vote on the corrected bill early this afternoon.

Second Update | Congress-geek journal The Hill has a rundown of last night’s votes — four of the Senate’s fifty-nine Dems (Bayh, Lincoln, Webb, and Ben Nelson) voted for at least one of the Republicans’ 29 amendments last night, and three of the chamber’s Republicans voted against at least one. More amendments will be voted on this morning, but the GOP would need to win ten Democratic votes while holding all of their own to prevail on any of them.

Seems pretty clear that’s not going to happen.

Third Update | The Senate approved the revised bill with no further amendments this afternoon, by a vote of 56-43. The House is expected to accept the Senate’s fixes this evening.

The University of California Board of Regents are holding a three-day meeting at UC San Francisco this week. The meeting starts this morning, and ends on Thursday.

A preview of the meeting from the UC Berkeley Daily Californian can be found here, and another writeup with a bunch of links is here. UC Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng has put together a briefing on the meeting’s agenda, and he’ll be liveblogging the meeting starting at 10:30 am Pacific Time today. If any news breaks, I’ll of course cover it here.

One item to watch is a proposed change in professional fee policy that the San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this month — a change which would drop the word “public” from the phrase “total in-state fees charged will be at or below the total tuition and/or fees charged by comparable degree programs at other comparable public institutions.” As I wrote at the time, this is an astoundingly ill-considered idea, from any number of perspectives.

So what’s the status of that proposal? It’s not clear. According to Jesse Cheng, there’s no reference to it in any of the meeting materials distributed so far — not in the publicly available agenda, and not in the documents distributed to the student regents.

There’s a similar item is on the agenda — a statement asserting the Regents’ power to set any student fee “at any level it deems appropriate” — but what happened to the amendment the Chronicle reported on remains a mystery.

When we get more, you’ll get more.

Update | A commenter has linked to a press release about a planned protest.

After a morning USSA meeting in DC, I spent most of the day driving north on I-95 in a ridiculously blinding rainstorm. Posting will resume tomorrow.