Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Relating to Contributions and Expenditures Intended to Affect Elections -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I come to speak today on a question of enormous importance. Before I do so, I wish to take a moment, as I was just with the majority leader and the deputy leader and a number of our colleagues where we held a ceremony in commemoration of a Congressional Medal of Honor that was issued in remembrance of those who gave their lives on September 11, 13 years ago. Neither the Presiding Officer nor I were Members of the Senate at that time, but I think all of us remember where we were that early Tuesday morning, and the ceremony we just came from was an appropriate tribute.

STUDENT LOAN DEBT

Madam President, during the most recent recess in August, I crisscrossed Virginia in a variety of efforts. One that was particularly meaningful to me was where I did a statewide student debt tour, where literally I spoke with hundreds of students and graduates from families of nine Virginia colleges and universities about student debt and what this crushing amount of student debt is doing to their opportunities to get the same kind of fair shot the Presiding Officer and I both had.

The schools I visited ranged from big 4-year public universities, small, private liberal arts colleges, to one of our historically Black colleges, as well as a 2-year community college. The student debt figure right now is at $1.2 trillion, exceeding credit card debt. Student debt has exceeded the aggregate of auto loan debt, credit card debt, and home equity debt balances, becoming, next to mortgages, the second largest debt of U.S. households. That means that for far too many young people, and not so young people, they are forced to put off their decisions about starting a family, launching a startup business, or buying a home because of the burdens of student debt. Many young people find themselves working in jobs they didn't want or necessarily train for just to pay off their student debts.

At Old Dominion University I spoke to Carina. She is a bright and ambitious young woman who told me that in her sophomore year, she worked three jobs, at one point four jobs, to ensure that she met tuition. She mentioned that she was the first of all her family members to step foot on a college campus. She said: ``College is a foreign field in my family.'' She said: ``I am a pioneer.'' She is not alone. The challenges she faces are repeated time and time again.

At Virginia State University, one of our historically Black colleges, I met with Tobias, who mentioned that a lot of his peers had to drop out of school because they could not afford to take out any more loans or debt. He told me: Senator Warner, I have made the decision to stay in school. It is the key to my future, but I do so knowing that I will have to spend a lot of years paying off student loans.

At one of our finer public institutions in Virginia, the College of William & Mary, I had a great conversation with Jacob, a junior originally from the far southwest part of our State, in Lebanon, VA. He is graduating from college in 3 years instead of 4 because of dual enrollment he took while he was in high school, at Southwest Virginia Community College. He told me that despite his ambition, it is financially impossible for him to go on to immediately get a graduate degree or buy a home or buy a car or start a business, because even with shortening college from 4 years to 3 years, he still has a tremendous amount of student debt.

I have to tell my colleagues, across Virginia I have heard over the last year more about this issue than virtually any other issue, from young people, from families, from parents. I remember somebody in Virginia Beach not too long ago, a young man, 31 years old, who actually served in elective office. He had graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, had worked as a lawyer, had been laid off, and was moving back in with his parents at the age of 31. I could almost see his ambitions being crushed because his student debt payments amounted to $2,000 a month. Where does he get the same kind of fair shot that many of us had?

I am the first member of my family to graduate from college. I got out of college and law school and worked for a while, started businesses, failed miserably twice. The third time I managed to do well in a startup industry called cell phones. But I came out of that experience with a total of $15,000 worth of debt. I am not sure I would have taken the first shot or second shot or, Lord knows a third shot, if I had come out with $50,000 $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, or $100,000 of debt that many people come out of school with now.

We have to get on this issue. This issue is having an effect on our economic recovery. I meet with homebuilders on a regular basis and with realtors on a regular basis. They are saying, The real estate market is recovering for everybody except people buying starter homes. Why are they not buying starter homes? Time and again because of crushing amounts of student debt.

I hope during this shortened period we will get a chance to have a conversation about a broadbased proposal to refinance student debt at lower rates. I am not sure we are going to be successful in that proposal, but I think it is a conversation and debate we ought to have. I look forward to supporting that effort. But if we are not able to get that effort across the finish line right now, we can't walk away from this issue.

I have worked on a series of bipartisan, targeted reforms that would reduce costs, increase transparency, and allow students to better manage their amounts of debt. Any one of these proposals isn't going to completely solve this problem, but this should not go into the bucket of issues we continue to kick down the road. The issue of student debt, the affordability of college, are issues of enormous economic proportion and, frankly, one that shouldn't be viewed as a Democrat or Republican issue.

Let me speak briefly about a couple of my proposals. First is a proposal I partnered with Senator Wyden and Senator Rubio on that in any rational place should be a complete no-brainer. It is a bill called Know Before You Go. The idea is quite simple. Let's do with higher education what we have done in real estate with the Zillow Web site or what we have done with the travel pricing, with Travelocity and a series of other Web sites, and try to take every 4-year institution, 2-year institution, career and technical education program, graduate program, and make them totally transparent on a single user-friendly Web site, where before you go, you know what your chances of graduating are, how much debt you might want to take on, if you major in art history, the way my daughter did, what your chances of getting a job are and how much it is going to pay, so that we can actually make people better informed consumers before they choose higher education.

Probably next to buying a house, higher education is the most expensive investment you will make in a lifetime. Maybe students will find out that if they go to UVA and drop out after 3 years and come out with a lot of debt, they will not have much with which to get into the job market, whereas if they went to Piedmont Community College and actually came out with a 2-year degree in medical tech fields, they will have a 90-percent placement opportunity.

This Know Before You Go Act--we have collected most of this data already, so it should not be that big a stretch to put this in a user-friendly fashion. What if Tobias's friends at Virginia State had a better idea before enrolling in college how much they would be expected to pay, how this would actually break down grants versus loans, a recognition of the actual graduation rate and their job prospects upon graduation? Maybe some of them might choose a different path.

Better informed consumers of higher education would be one no-brainer step.

A second opportunity--and I do not know where it falls on the ideological spectrum, but on the commonsense spectrum it makes an awful lot of sense. Why does college have to be 4 years anymore? Why can't we have more students--particularly first-generation students--getting a jump-start on college with dual enrollment in high school? The key on this is to make sure the credits they get in their dual enrollment at community college actually count toward their degree requirement, which requires what are called articulation agreements between the 4-year institutions and the 2-year institutions. It does not do much good if you come into college with a lot of course credit but it does not count toward your degree requirements. Let's try to make sure more students can knock off a semester or a year of college in high school. That would save families $10,00, $20,000, $30,000, in effect, if we could make that happen.

If you are a low-income student and you qualify for a Pell grant, why not be able to use part of those Pell grant proceeds in high school if the credits you receive in high school in dual enrollment actually count toward your degree requirements? Again, that is a jump-start on college. It would make sure that a student such as Jacob at William & Mary, rather than being the exception, would become more the rule.

Let me talk about another proposal. Again, I am working with my colleague from Florida, Senator Rubio, on this legislation. Senator Rubio has a story similar to mine. He is the first generation in his family to graduate from college and law school. He tells stories as well of years of repaying student debt.

In our student debt processes, we already have a series of payment proposals. Unfortunately, most of them are confusing. Many of them end up like the student I know or the young person I know in Virginia Beach who is on a fixed payment proposal. This individual, as I mentioned--$2,000 a month, completely crushing his abilities to take any chances at all.

So what Senator Rubio and I have done is we put together a proposal that would say the first option--it would still be the young person's option to opt out of, but the first option would be an income-based repayment proposal that would cap your student debt repayment at 10 percent of your income. What would this do? Ten percent of your income would allow you to take that chance on that startup business. Ten percent of your income, capped, would maybe give you the ability to say: Oh gosh, if I hit a rough spot, I will not get crushed. I will not have to move back in with my family.

This better structured, financially sustainable, income-based repayment proposal would allow young people to better manage their debt and avoid the impact of default.

Part of our proposal includes loan forgiveness programs that will provide borrowers such as Jacob in southwest Virginia the kind of relief they want.

Even if we cannot agree on a grand refinancing proposal, this income-based capping at 10 percent--which has been greeted by left and right alike as a dramatic step forward--ought to be part of our discussion.

Then I come to another proposal--one that, quite honestly, even this body with all of its dysfunction ought to be able to get done. I partnered with my colleagues Senator Thune and Senator Ayotte on a very business-friendly proposal that would be an option for an employer and employee. Right now, if an employee wants to continue with their education, an employer can take up to $5,000 of that employee's salary and apply it to their tuition, tax free, on continuing education. Well, if we are allowing an employer to do that for an employee to continue their education, to increase their skills, why not provide that same kind of option for an employer to apply that same amount--up to $5,000 of a person's salary--directly against an employee's student debt pretax and tax free as well? It does not cost the employer another dime. This is purely at the option of the employee. It would be a great retention tool for a company to say: Hey, keep working with us. We are going to give you this benefit.

That young or not-so-young person will get this money pretax going against their student debt. It is common sense, bipartisan, and something on which--even with all of our bitter battles back and forth--we ought to be able to find common ground.

As I mentioned at the outset, like many Virginians, like many probably in this body, as the first in my family to have graduated from college--I could not have gotten to college; my family did not have the resources. I had to work. I got grants. But I also had to take out student debt. The student debt that I had at $15,000 pales in comparison to the average amount of debt with which people come out of even public universities in Virginia right now--more than $25,000. I had $15,000 of debt after college and law school. Look at people who come out of graduate school. On average those numbers more than double.

This is an issue whose time has come for us to address. In America in the 21st century, you should not go broke if you decide to go to college. We all encourage our young people to get that education that will allow them to prosper in a knowledge-based economy, but we hold out a false hope when we say: Go get that education, but we are going to put you into such debt that for the next 20 years you are not going to be able to exercise that education in the way you wanted to because you are going to be scrambling to repay the obligations it took you to get those skills.

I say this as a former Governor. This is the case. I was proud of the amount of the investment we made in higher education when I was Governor. Quite honestly, if we look across the board at every State in our Nation as a whole, over the last 20 years Federal and State direct aid to higher education has been virtually a straight line down. The cost of a higher education has been a straight line up. How have we filled that gap? We have filled that gap with basically an unfair deal to a whole generation. We have said: Do not worry about the cost; just take out more debt. For a while, when the economy was good and you could get a job pretty much guaranteed coming out of college or graduate school, this did not present a crisis. In the last 4 or 5 years, as we have seen college graduates, law school graduates, graduate school graduates coming out without job opportunities, we have seen this house of cards collapse.

I again remind my colleagues that there is $1.2 trillion of student debt--greater than credit card debt. The cost of a higher education is continuing to escalate at a rate even higher than health care costs.

For those of us who are lucky enough to serve in this body, we all got our fair shot. If we are really going to honor our commitment to this next generation--and, quite honestly, the parents who are also helping to pay off this next generation--we have to deal with this crushing issue of student debt. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle as we address this problem in a reasonable, responsible, and timely manner.

I yield the floor.

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