ROLAND, Okla. -- The bill collector called when Clay Stanley, gaunt and suffering from AIDS, lay bedridden in his apartment, back from the hospital after a bout with a viral infection.

It wasn't about a car or credit card. The call concerned a matter Mr. Stanley, who is 39 years old, says he had long forgotten: student loans he took out two decades before. The private collector, acting on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education, said Mr. Stanley must pay $69 a month or the government would take a larger sum than that each month from his Social Security disability checks, Mr. Stanley recalls. "I didn't know what to do, so I said 'OK,' " he says.

Years after a political outcry over high levels of student-loan defaults, the Education Department has become one of the toughest debt collectors around. Over the past decade, it has won a steadily expanding arsenal to wield against former students who don't repay.

A 1998 change in federal law, for instance, made it extremely difficult for people to escape student loans through personal bankruptcy. The Education Department also can now seize parts of borrowers' paychecks, tax refunds and Social Security payments without a court order, a power that only the Internal Revenue Service, among federal agencies, regularly wields.

Access to a government database of the newly employed has enabled the department to make much more effective use of private collection companies. And it can go after even decades-old student loans, because there's no statute of limitations on them, unlike most consumer debt.

As a result, the Education Department collected $5.7 billion in defaulted student loans in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, more than twice as much as in 1998. For current loans that go into default, the department now projects it will ultimately retrieve every dollar of principal, plus almost 20% in fees and overdue interest, a prediction few private lenders would be bold enough to make.

The aggressive approach has sparked an outcry from some borrowers, consumer-advocacy lawyers and even some bankruptcy-court judges. They complain that the department runs roughshod over some former students who've suffered reversals of fortune. "Student-loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and bankruptcy specialist.

Some who favor a softer stance argue that student loans are a form of financial aid -- not quite the same as other consumer credit. They also note that the borrowers have, after all, been encouraged by the federal program to go into debt to attend college. And they say students are usually financially unsophisticated borrowers, lacking an understanding of how debts can pile up because of unpaid interest. So shouldn't they get more slack, the critics ask, than, say, credit-card spendthrifts?

The Education Department responds that taxpayers, legislators and the many students who do repay their loans all expect it to pursue those who don't. It says the federal government, the state agencies that administer the program and the private lenders that primarily make the federally guaranteed loans all work with past-due borrowers. They offer counseling and a chance to refinance at today's low interest rates, says Terri Shaw, the Education Department's chief operating officer for student aid, who adds that there are plans that link the size of payments to incomes. "We're here to help," Ms. Shaw says.

Default Rate

The government's toughness traces back to the 1980s, when politicians became alarmed by high levels of student-loan defaults. Some waged a campaign against deadbeat doctors, lawyers and other professionals taking advantage of the government.

Today the default rate on recently made loans has dropped. It was 5.2% last year, down from 22% in 1990. And professionals such as doctors and lawyers are far from the worst offenders. Graduates of four-year or graduate programs at private universities default at a 3.1% rate, while students of trade schools and community colleges default at almost twice the 5.2% overall rate, according to Education Department data. Studies show that those most likely not to repay are students who, like Mr. Stanley, didn't complete their studies.

In the 1980s, Mr. Stanley took out a $3,700 student loan to attend Garland County Community College in Hot Springs, Ark., then transferred to Henderson State University in Arkadelphia. He never graduated, figuring he needed to take a job to support himself. He worked as a clerk in a hospital, a toy-store manager, a bartender and a blackjack dealer, never earning more than $7 an hour.

After Mr. Stanley learned 10 years ago he had the AIDS virus, he started living on disability checks from Social Security. Standing 6 feet 2 inches, he now weighs just 106 pounds and needs a rubber band to keep a ring from sliding off his thinned ring finger. He doesn't have a job and takes 16 pills a day to stay alive. To help make ends meet, he has a roommate in his apartment in Roland, Okla., near the Arkansas border.

Mr. Stanley says he hadn't heard anything about his student loan in six or seven years when he got a call in late 2003 from Pioneer Credit Recovery Inc. Pioneer is a unit of student-loan giant SLM Corp., commonly called Sallie Mae, and has a contract to collect for the Education Department. Mr. Stanley learned that unpaid interest and penalties had nearly doubled his balance to $7,000.

He was getting $696 a month in Social Security disability payments. He says a Pioneer agent challenged the $225 a month he was paying on his 1999 Pontiac Grand Am, which he uses to drive to a clinic in Tulsa, Okla. "I told him you can take my car if you'll drive me to my doctor's appointments," Mr. Stanley says.

He says the agent told him he needed to start paying $69 a month, or the government could withdraw $189 from each monthly disability check. Mr. Stanley says he agreed to pay $69 a month for six months. He supplied his bank-account number and the withdrawals began.