...In a statement, First Marblehead confirmed that it had received a subpoena related to its role in the student lending industry. ''We plan to cooperate fully with the attorney general's information requests,'' the company said.

While Mr. Meyers said he was unaware of any specific investigation, he defended First Marblehead's practices, including the expanding trade in so-called direct-to-consumer, or D.T.C., loans that are made over the Internet. ''Any implication that the company has not stuck to its mission of access and affordability is wrong and unfair,'' he says. ''The people who choose the D.T.C. route make that choice. It is not foisted upon them.''

A spokeswoman for First Marblehead, Janice Walker, said the company urges students to access federal aid first.

Industry analysts say that students who seek private funding from a mail or Internet offer -- the very business that Mr. Meyers helped start through First Marblehead -- can wind up paying unnecessarily high rates and fees. While decades of deregulation have allowed lenders to offer students and homeowners more loans through a broadening array of financial products, those same forces have also curtailed government supervision of possibly abusive practices in the lending business, critics say.

For his part, Mr. Meyers, who worked his way through college, says the industry helps far more people than it harms. Without access to loans, he contends, many students would be forced to drop out or even not to enroll. ''There have been populations of students who have been overleveraged for 40 years,'' he says. ''The bigger problem is that we have students who have been underleveraged.''

Others, however, say they are concerned about the rise in student debt and the fact that college-bound applicants may not be aware that there are options other than relatively high-priced private loans. Even colleges themselves, analysts say, may have no idea how much debt students are taking on.

''We find it very alarming,'' says Stephen Burd, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, a policy group that has been critical of the industry's practices. ''Colleges may not be aware the students are taking out the loans, so there is nobody giving any guidance.''

The attorney general's office is examining First Marblehead's marketing practices going back six years, when Mr. Meyers was still running the company, according to people close to the investigation. The regulators also asked the company to hand over documents related to his departure in 2005. That year, Mr. Meyers resigned as chairman and chief executive after the First Marblehead board accused him of giving gifts worth more than $32,000 to a female student loan executive at Bank of America, one of the company's two biggest clients. Mr. Meyers and Bank of America declined to comment. But several people close to Mr. Meyers say that he was simply being generous to a longtime friend, and they point out that he bought the gifts with his own money...

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