Keep Student Loans Affordable Act of 2013--Motion to Proceed--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Last year the most profitable company in America was ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil made about $44.9 billion in profit last year. America's student loan program did better. America's student loan program last year made a profit of right around $50 billion, eclipsing the profit of ExxonMobil, of Apple, of JPMorgan Chase. In fact, of every U.S.-based company, none of them ran a profit as high, as steep, as generous as the U.S. student loan program did.

Why I am coming down to the floor to support a 1-year freeze on student loan rates is because, as you have led this argument, that is the discussion we should be having. Why on Earth do we allow our student loan program to make profits greater than any other American company makes today? Why are our students being asked, more so than almost any other population in our country, to bear the burden of paying down our deficit? It doesn't make any sense.

It is time then that in the context of the Higher Education Act, which we are hopefully going to debate later this year, we have that broader conversation. This bill on the floor now, giving us a 1-year freeze to keep students where they are today, paying a 3.4-percent interest rate, just makes sense--both in the short term to try to make sure students don't have to pay upward of $5,000 over the course of the repayment of their loan but then allows us to start to have a conversation with ourselves as to whether we want to allow the student loan program to be the most profitable company in the United States on the backs of students.

This matters to me because I am one of the millions of young Americans who is still paying back my student loans. My wife and I are paying them back as we speak. Of course, with two young little boys at home, we are also scurrying to save as much as we can to pay for their future college costs.

I am not going to stand here and complain because between my wife and I we make a pretty good salary. We can afford to pay back our student loans, and we can afford to squirrel a little bit away for our two little kids. But our story is not the reality for millions of other young families who can't afford to do both of those things.

The average college graduate in this country has a much lower unemployment rate than other Americans, somewhere around 4 or 5 percent. Young college graduates today stand at an 8.8-percent unemployment rate and an 18.3-percent underemployment rate. That is the stuff we don't talk about enough. There are a lot of young people who are working part-time or temporary jobs that don't bring in enough money in order to pay back their student loans, which on average today are somewhere around $30,000. That is the average. Everybody can point to a neighbor or a friend who is walking out of their undergraduate education today with $100,000 or more.

The fact is there are millions of families in the position of my family. We are squeezed between paying back the debt we owe and trying to put away money so our kids don't have to have the same kind of debt we do. That is money that doesn't go into the main street of our economy, doesn't go to fix up your house and put a carpenter to work, and doesn't go to the local grocery store or to the restaurant around the corner. Instead, it is money that gets sent, by and large, to the big banks. It doesn't make sense. This bill on the floor allows us to have this bigger, broader conversation.

I will say this though. We are fooling ourselves if we think the solution to our higher education affordability crisis is only the interest rate we pay on loans. It is not. Shame on us if coming out of the resolution of this debate, which I hope comes in the next couple of weeks, we don't step back and say there is so much more that this Senate and this Congress can be doing to take on the broader issue of affordability.

Students took out about $113 billion in student loans this last year. That is double what they took out just 10 years ago. We can't afford to have the amount of money being taken out in student loans double on a decade-by-decade basis. That will bankrupt not only our students, but it will bankrupt our country no matter what interest rate we put on these loans.

In the context of the Higher Education Act, we ought to start challenging schools to think out of the box when it comes to assessing the cost of education. Wesleyan University in Connecticut has given the option to students to get a degree in 3 years instead of 4. More and more schools are moving to cheaper but still high-value online education.

It is probably time we stepped back and asked even tougher questions about whether it makes sense to award degrees based on a largely arbitrary number of credits, rather than an assessment of the skills you have gained, maybe over 4 years but, frankly, maybe even over 2 1/2 or 3 years.

If college is about preparing students for the workforce, then maybe we should be awarding degrees and costing out degrees based on whether you are ready to enter the workforce, not just based on if you have gone the requisite number of years or taken the requisite number of courses. Maybe 50 years ago we could afford the system we have, but we can't any longer. We can't have that conversation if we don't settle this one.

My hope is we will be able to extend the 3.4-percent interest rate for the time being and that we can have a serious conversation about the issue of profitability in the long run.

Lastly, I will just say this. Senator Alexander has left the floor, but the Republican proposal is temporary as well. He is right to point out that for a certain subset of individuals who don't qualify today for the 3.4-interest rate, the Republican proposal may, in the short run, provide a different lower interest rate. But we know interest rates are going up. We know their proposal is no less temporary than the 1-year freeze we offered, because ultimately in the long run or, frankly, in the medium run, those students who today might qualify for a lower rate are going to be paying a much higher rate in the not-so-distant future.

We are kidding ourselves if we think the benefit of the Republican proposal is that in the long run students are all of a sudden going to gain the benefit of today's interest rates, which is not how things work. It is not how the trend line is going.

Lastly, about 1 month ago I was sitting with a group of counselors at a local afterschool program in Danbury, CT. They were all sort of working part-time jobs and counseling kids at this afterschool program because they believed in the program. These were community-minded kids. They were the salt-of-the-Earth kids who truly cared about trying to help out disadvantaged youth in their neighborhood, but none of them were going to college.

I asked them: Are you not going to college because of the cost?

They looked at me as if I had three heads. They said: Of course, the reason we are not going to college is the cost. We would love to be in college today, but there is no way we can afford it.

The fact is we are looking at 4.4 million students over the next 10 years who are likely to not be able to afford college simply because of the cost. The difference between 3.4 and 6.8 percent can be $5,000 for some students over the course of the repayment of their loan. That is the difference maker for students. We are kidding ourselves if we don't think that 18- and 19-year-old kids aren't doing the math when they are deciding whether they can afford to go to college. They are much more sophisticated than people on this floor think they are. They understand the deal we are potentially giving them on the floor of the Senate is one that will make college unaffordable for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of students. Shame on us if we don't have a better answer for those kids in Danbury, CT, and millions of others similar to them across the country who just want a shot at college and wish to make sure that they alone are not asked to pick up the burden of paying down the deficit of the United States.

I yield the floor.

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