Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, before I address the issue of college affordability, I want to send my condolences to the families in Oregon, another community ravaged by a school shooting, the 37th of 2014, the 74th school shooting since Sandy Hook. Those are pretty stunning numbers: 37 school shootings this year alone, more than 1 a week; 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook.

I will make the comment one more time, that we are becoming accomplices in these mass murders. We are becoming complicit in this murder of children all across our country. When we do nothing, when we sit on our hands idly as children are gunned down all across our country, we send a message of acceptance that we can do practical things that will lessen the chance that people will be killed in our schools and in our homes and in our neighborhoods.

I will not go through the list right now, but we also can send a message that enough is enough. That message, frankly at this point, is probably just as important as the practical effects of the laws we would change.

I thank the Presiding Officer for her great work on bringing the issue of college affordability to the point where we have reached a national debate around what we can do to try to relieve families of the crippling debt sitting on top of them today. As the youngest Member of this body, I perhaps know in as personal terms as anyone else about what this burden means for my wife and myself who continue to owe money on our student loans, and for our neighbors and friends who are in similar positions.

I want to tell you a story today of one such family, a namesake of mine, the Murphys from Killingworth--no relation. Dennis Murphy recently wrote me about his family's story. Dennis is 52 years old and has five kids. His parents emigrated here from County Kerry, Ireland, and he was born in New York. His family lived in a small apartment in the Bronx. While Dennis was still a boy, his family moved to a house in East Haven, CT, which his father called the promised land.

His father died at the age of 50, when Dennis was 14 years old. Since the family was poor and the father did not have life insurance, Dennis could not afford to go to college himself, so he went straight to work. He was lucky enough to find a job working for the railroad, working as a locomotive engineer for Metro North. He still works at that job, Dennis does, making a good living and earning a solid upper middle-class salary.

Dennis wanted to provide a better life for his own family. So he worked as much as he could, took as many hours as he could, he took as many extra shifts as possible, he worked on holidays, and he was eventually able to make his life better, make his family's life a little bit better. They bought a house in Killingworth. He hoped his kids would get to go to college. One of his daughters has a learning disability and needs extra support, so that took up a decent amount of the family's income, but his oldest son Dennis Murphy, Jr., was a good student in high school, made the honor roll.

When Dennis junior was accepted to the University of Albany, Dennis was so proud that his son would receive the college degree that he never did. Dennis junior worked since the age of 16 to do his part to be able to afford college. He continued working all throughout college. Dennis junior seldom asked his dad for any money. Unlike many of his friends, Dennis junior actually graduated within 4 years.

But the family still had to contribute to Dennis junior's education. So without any money saved away, with money going to pay for the house and for raising five kids and for their daughter's learning disabilities, Dennis had to take out PLUS loans that ultimately totaled over $100,000. Because the interest rate on the loans is fixed at 8.5 percent, the minimum monthly payments were around $700 to $800 a month. With their mortgage payments and the rest of their living expenses, Dennis cannot afford to pay this amount, even with his good salary. Frankly, like a lot of Americans, he did not realize when he first took the loans how the interest would add up over 4 years, nor did he understand how much the monthly payments would be.

The stress of wondering how they are ever going to pay back this huge debt has caused a lot of tension in the family, a lot of arguments within his formerly close family. Sometimes Dennis says he wonders whether he should have let his son go to college at all. Even though Dennis junior has a new good job earning $20 an hour because of his degree, it is not enough for him to be able to contribute significantly to paying off these loans either.

Dennis's family came to America, got that little apartment in the Bronx for reasons that are familiar to nearly every one of us in this Chamber, this idea that if you came to the United States, you had a shot to move and move quickly, a fair shot at economic mobility. My family came from Ireland about two generations before Dennis's, but it was the same reason that brought them here to the United States. It was education that was the vehicle for advancement.

You know, it was not a myth. It was not a story that they told in places such as Ireland and Italy and Poland. It was true that if you came here and did your work and played by the rules and saved a little bit of money you could go to college and you could do significantly better than your parents did. But the reality is that idea, that truism of America being the home of the greatest level of economic mobility in the world is becoming a myth. The odds today that a young person will go to college if their parents did not is 29 percent.

That is one of the lowest rates in the industrialized world. Think of it the other way. Seventy percent of kids whose parents didn't go to college will never go to college. Seventy percent of kids who didn't go to college will essentially be destined to live the same life and take in the same income level their parents did. That is a stunning lack of economic mobility.

The truth is that it is getting worse specifically for a particular group of Americans. For African Americans, the gap between those with a college degree in the African-American community and in the White community has gone from 13 points 20 years ago to 20 points today. The gap for Latinos was 18 points 20 years ago, and it is 25 points today. So for African Americans and Latinos, that dream of economic mobility is getting even further away than for other folks.

America used to be No. 1 in the world with respect to the amount of young adults with college degrees. We are 12th in the world today. In a very short period of time we have gone from leading the world in college graduates to becoming rather middling.

You don't, frankly, need a college degree for one thing: You don't need a college degree to figure out why fewer people have college degrees. Here it is: Since 1989 the cost of college has gone up by 307 percent and income for the average family has gone up by 72 percent. You don't need a degree in mathematics or a graduate degree in rocket science to understand that when you have this disparity between the growth in income and the growth in the cost of college, you are going to leave millions of families on the outside when it comes to accessing the apparatus of opportunity that has historically made this country the place where economic mobility was more real than anywhere else.

That is why this piece of legislation this week matters so much--because to Dennis the numbers are not going to lie. Dennis is going to go from paying 8.5 percent to about 6.4 percent. You think that is only about 2 percentage points. That is thousands of dollars in savings for the Murphys--thousands of dollars that today they don't have. That story can be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times. We think there are about 300,000 families just in the State of Connecticut who are going to be able to access a lower rate of interest based on the legislation we are going to pass this week. These numbers are pretty stunning, but the fact is that there are stories like Dennis's all across my State and all across this country, and we can do something about it this week.

As Senator Harkin said--and let me finish with the thought that this is the beginning of the work we have to do--the reality is that it is very important to give students access to lower cost loans, as we will hopefully do this week. It is very important to lower the borrowing burden for families who have already taken out loans, but we actually have to get serious about this number. We actually have to get serious about bending this curve so that college isn't 307 percent more expensive another 20 years from today.

So I hope that in the reauthorization bill our committee, the HELP Committee, is going to undertake, an idea that has been put forward by myself, Senator Schatz, Senator Sanders, and Senator Murray will get a fair airing; that is, the idea that we should start expecting some accountability when it comes to these schools that are getting billions of dollars in Federal aid. We send out $140 billion in Federal aid every year, and we really have very loose standards when it comes to affordability and outcome.

A group of schools is under the for-profit umbrella of a company called Corinthian in California. It has 50 percent of its students dropping out after 1 year and 36 percent of its students defaulting on their student loans. They charge $41,000 for a paralegal degree, and the local community college charges $2,500. That is a miserable set of outcomes. That is a total lack of affordability. Yet they collect $1.6 billion every year in Federal aid--$1.6 billion in Federal aid every year. Federal aid means you and me. Our taxpayer dollars are going to a school that is doing nothing about affordability and is delivering very bad outcomes.

So this bill is very important for the Murphys and hundreds of thousands of families like them. But our work is not done. It is time for us to agree that in addition to making it easier for students and families to afford college, it is finally time for Congress to put some real pressure on these schools to do something about the cost of tuition and the quality of degrees they provide. I am going to be very excited to cast my vote for this week's legislation, for the Murphys--no relation--and thousands of families like them in Connecticut.

I yield back.

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