[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 115 (Wednesday, July 22, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5452-S5454]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                 REAUTHORIZING THE HIGHER EDUCATION ACT

 Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a 
copy of my remarks at the American Enterprise Institute be printed in 
the Record.
  There being no objection, the materials was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act

       Thank you, Andrew. It's great to be here. It's great to be 
     at AEI, an organization for which I have lots of respect. I 
     also have great respect for our institutions for higher 
     education. As Dr. Kelly said, I was once president of the 
     University of Tennessee. That's harder than it looks. I 
     remember on my first day on campus a faculty member came up 
     to me, I was very enthusiastic that day, and she said, ``You 
     have so much enthusiasm, you're reminding me of Clark Kerr.'' 
     And I said, ``Well, thank you very much,'' because Clark Kerr 
     was a distinguished president of the University of 
     California. And I said, ``How is that?'' She said, ``You 
     know, he arrived and left in the same way--fired with 
     enthusiasm.'' It's a precarious existence, most college 
     presidents will tell you.
       I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last week in 
     which I urged fellow politicians and some pundits to stop 
     telling students they cannot afford a college education. I 
     noted that two years of community college are free or nearly 
     free for low-income students, given that tuition and fees 
     across the country average $3,300 and that the average Pell 
     grant is about the same. Public 4-year colleges average about 
     $9,000 in tuition and fees. I wrote that at the University of 
     Tennessee, Knoxville, which is closer to $12,000, nearly 
     every in-state freshman has a state Hope Scholarship, a third 
     have Pell grants, and many have access to state aid. About 75 
     percent of all college students attend those public 
     institutions.
       Even many of the private elite colleges have programs to 
     help families figure out what they can afford to borrow and 
     then those institutions such as Georgetown University make up 
     the difference. Many students borrow money for college, but 
     the average 4-year graduate's debt is about $27,000--or 
     roughly the same as the average new car loan. And for that 
     investment, you get a college degree that the College Board 
     still says will earn you $1 million dollars more over your 
     lifetime than if you hadn't earned that degree. The problem, 
     I explained in my op-ed, is that we need to grow the 
     percentage of Americans with college degrees over the next 5 
     years--otherwise we're on track to fall short by 5 million 
     workers with degrees. So politicians, in my view, should stop 
     discouraging students from attending college--especially the 
     low-income students who are likely to benefit most from 
     federal aid, and may also be the most easily discouraged.
       Well, on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal ran letters to 
     the editor in response to my op-ed. Here's a sampling from 
     one: ``Lamar Alexander has been a politician so long that he 
     no longer understands that money comes from working people 
     who understand what is expensive, and four years of college 
     plus living expenses is expensive.'' From another, ``The 
     traditional system is unsustainable.'' From another 
     ``Politicians should stop talking about a college 'premium' 
     because the costs, even with all the subsidies, exceed the 
     benefits for many.'' And another: ``It is counterintuitive to 
     many politicians, but the more affordable they try to make 
     higher education, the less affordable it will become.''
       In other words--I hit a nerve.
       But buried at the bottom of these letters published by the 
     Wall Street Journal was this brief line from a woman in San 
     Diego: ``Years ago'' she said, ``there was a bumper sticker: 
     `Think education is expensive? Try life without it!' '' Still 
     holds true and always will.
       I've always said that it is never easy to pay for college. 
     It's just easier than most people think. And as we approach 
     the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in the Senate 
     education Committee, I don't pretend that our system is not 
     in need of reforms. But let's begin with the shared 
     recognition that life without education is more expensive--
     and that the cost to our country will be great if we don't 
     increase the number of Americans with post-secondary 
     education and degrees.
       So let's look at measures we can take as a federal 
     government to encourage colleges to control their costs, 
     operate more efficiently, help students graduate more quickly 
     with less debt--and let's be sure that all these measures do 
     nothing to challenge the autonomy and independence that is at 
     the heart of our education system--the autonomy and 
     independence that have driven our colleges and universities 
     to create the best system of higher education in the world.
       So I'd like to focus today on four goals for the 
     reauthorization that we're working on: first: ending the 
     overregulation of colleges and universities; second: ending 
     the federal collection and dissemination of useless data; 
     third: improving our accreditation system; and fourth: 
     ensuring that institutions begin sharing in the risk of 
     lending to students.
       So let's take the first one--ending the overregulation of 
     colleges. Now I'm here today as a Republican speaking to a 
     generally conservative audience about reducing regulations--
     not a new idea for most of us. But there's an important 
     distinction in this--we already have bipartisan support in 
     the committee for reducing these regulations. Senator 
     Mikulski, Senator Bennet, Senator Burr and I commissioned a 
     report two years ago on higher education regulation by a task 
     force of educators, and we asked for specific recommendations 
     on how to reduce these regulations. We said, ``We don't want 
     another sermon. Tell us exactly what we could do to reduce 
     the regulatory burden.'' And we got back 59 recommendations, 
     with 10 listed as priorities. A dozen of them are things that 
     the U.S. Secretary of Education himself could do and the rest 
     would require some sort of congressional action. We are 
     currently working on legislation that adopts and implements 
     many of the report's recommendations.
       The report told us that the higher education system is 
     entangled in, the report's words, a ``jungle of red tape'' 
     and that every workday, each one of our 6,000 higher 
     education institutions gets a letter or a guidance or a new 
     rule from the U.S. Department of Education, on average. Every 
     workday, every one of our institutions, 6,000 of them, get a 
     letter or a guidance or a new rule from the US Department of 
     Education that presumably changes their procedures.
       Here are three examples of how that plays out in our 
     colleges:
       First, Vanderbilt University--because the chancellor of 
     Vanderbilt was one of the co-chairs of our group making these 
     recommendations and the other was the chancellor of the 
     University of Maryland. So Vanderbilt hired the Boston 
     Consulting Group to tell the university just how much it cost 
     Vanderbilt to comply with Federal rules and regulations in 
     one year, 2014, and the startling answer was $150 million--
     $11,000 per student. $11,000 is more than the average tuition 
     in fees at public universities in the United States.
       Second, here's the FAFSA form that 20 million Americans 
     fill out every year. Some of you have seen it. This is the 
     form 20 million Americans fill out every year in order to get 
     a grant or loan to attend college. Now most people fill it 
     out online, some financial aid officers disparage my doing 
     this because they say it's not that hard to fill out. Maybe 
     not for them, I mean they've been working on it for years. 
     But I've talked to students who have literally burst into 
     tears over the complexity of this thing. The president of a 
     community college in Memphis told me he thinks he loses 1,500 
     students a semester because this is simply such an 
     intimidating list of questions. We have testimony in our 
     education committee that said those 108 questions could be 
     reduced to two. One would be: what's the size of your family, 
     and two would be: what's the size of your family income. That 
     would answer 95 percent of the questions that the U.S. 
     Department of Education needs to award federal student aid.
       Third, the government hands out $24 billion in research 
     dollars to colleges and universities through the National 
     Institutes of Health. The National Academy of Sciences has a 
     study group that's twice done a survey and both times found 
     that 42 percent of a principal investigator's time with 
     federally funded research is spent on administrative tasks. 
     If we could reduce that 42 percent to 40 percent or 35 
     percent or 30 percent or 25

[[Page S5453]]

     percent, we could free up hundreds of millions of dollars, 
     maybe billions, for additional research. In other words, we 
     can save time, energy, money, and encourage more college 
     degrees if we reduce higher education regulations.
       My second goal is ending the federal collection and 
     dissemination of useless data.
       We've had five hearings on higher education this year. Our 
     third hearing was on consumer data. The federal government 
     collects a lot of data from 6,000 institutions. At the 
     hearing, I held up the data survey that each of our almost 
     1,000 public community colleges must fill out. It's similar 
     to the surveys that the other 5,000 colleges fill out. This 
     one was 426 pages of data requirements and reporting 
     instructions, with 3,300 different necessary responses or 
     inputs.
       Then there are the federally mandated college consumer 
     disclosures. Those require a 900-page binder to show what one 
     university with two campuses is required to disclose to 
     consumers. The law and regulations prescribe a dizzying 
     variety of ways the different disclosures must be sent to 
     current students and, upon request, the public items range 
     from the useful and necessary--such as providing the terms 
     and conditions of federal student aid to such things as 
     informing students when Constitution Day is. Not only do I 
     question what is really necessary--but more important, how 
     much of this is useful to students making a college choice? 
     Then, how might consumer information actually become useful 
     for prospective students, and what better information may be 
     needed? What requirements can we eliminate? And on a separate 
     issue--once we've collected the right data, how good are we 
     disseminating the data, at least in a way that you can 
     understand it? The government has created tools--from the 
     College Navigator to the College Scorecard--but the 
     government is really not very good at doing this, and 
     students aren't really actually using those tools very much 
     to choose among colleges.
       My third goal is to improve our accreditation system. We 
     held a hearing on accreditation in the committee last month. 
     I learned a lot, but our accreditation system has to improve 
     because there is really no decent alternative. Congress can't 
     monitor 6,000 colleges and universities. The Department of 
     Education sure can't. Accreditation has to work.
       Here are a few of the areas that I think could see 
     improvement, and there seems to be some consensus about 
     these:
       Getting accreditors back to focusing on quality and not on 
     all the other things Congress has asked accreditors to do 
     over the years, such as reviewing fire codes and looking over 
     an institution's finances.
       Changing the geographic nature of today's accreditation 
     system: There seems to be less validity today for having 
     regional accreditation agencies exclusively. When I was 
     president of the University of Tennessee I would look at the 
     University of Illinois or the University of Michigan--the 
     universities outside our region as peers.
       Allowing accreditors to use more discretion in their 
     oversight--in other words, using a lighter touch for some 
     institutions. So accreditors can get more of their time and 
     resources to institutions clearly in need of greater 
     oversight and have a lighter touch on those that don't.
       My last goal is ensuring that institutions begin sharing in 
     the risk of lending to students. We know that some students 
     today are borrowing more than they should. According to the 
     Department of Education, of the more than 41 million 
     borrowers with outstanding student debt, about 7 million, or 
     17 percent, are currently in default--meaning they haven't 
     made a payment on their loans in at least 9 months. The total 
     amount of loans currently in default is $108 billion or about 
     10 percent of the total outstanding balance of federal 
     student loans. Although the Department says it eventually 
     collects most of it.
       One way to address over-borrowing is to ensure that 
     colleges have some responsibility to, or vested interest in, 
     encouraging students to borrow wisely, graduate on time, and 
     be able to repay what they've been loaned. If colleges and 
     universities have this incentive, it may not only help 
     students make wiser decisions about how much to borrow, it 
     could help reduce the cost of college--thereby reducing debt. 
     For example, colleges might encourage students to complete 
     their education more quickly.
       Today nearly half of college students take longer than 6 
     years to complete any degree or certificate or never finish 
     one at all. Completion is important--nearly 70 percent of 
     those borrowers who default on their federal student loan 
     never finished their education.
       At The University of Tennessee Knoxville they're now saying 
     to students, ``You can take less than 15 hours if you want 
     to, but you're going to pay for 15 hours every semester 
     whether you take it or not.'' That's three more than federal 
     student aid requirements insist on. The chancellor told me 
     not long ago that most students are taking 15 hours since 
     they're paying for it anyway, and the graduation rate is 
     edging up.
       I have also encouraged colleges and universities to explore 
     a three year degree. The more rapidly you move through the 
     system, the less expense you have, and the quicker you get 
     into an earning capacity.
       I recently spoke at a graduation ceremony at Walters State 
     Community College in Tennessee where one of the graduates was 
     also graduating from high school that week. Getting both 
     degrees, and also entering Purdue University as a second 
     semester sophomore, saving that student an estimated $65,000. 
     At another community college in Tennessee, 30 percent of the 
     students at that community college are also in high school. 
     There's a growing practice of what we call ``dual 
     enrollment,'' and that permits students to spend less time 
     and spend less money on college.
       The President of George Washington University once told me, 
     ``You could run two complete colleges here [at his campus] 
     with two complete faculties, in the facilities now used half 
     the year for one. That's without cutting the length of 
     students' vacations, increasing class sizes or requiring 
     faculty to teach more.'' One of the biggest wastes in higher 
     education is the waste in the use of facilities. Dartmouth, 
     for example, saves $10 to $15 million per year, it estimates, 
     by requiring one mandatory summer session for its students. 
     Southern New Hampshire University's College for America just 
     began offering a $10,000 bachelor's degree.
       So we are working on a way to give colleges some skin in 
     the game. Senator Reed of Rhode Island has a proposal. He 
     wants to make colleges and universities responsible for a 
     portion of defaulted loans of students. That's a framework 
     worth considering. Others may have different ideas.
       For me, what is clear is that as a matter of principle and 
     fairness, all institutions--whether public, private or for-
     profit--should participate in this. I don't believe any 
     institution should be exempt from those requirements that we 
     may add to discourage over-borrowing and reduce college 
     costs. But it might be appropriate to consider establishing 
     multiple models of risk-sharing so that institutions with 
     differing missions and student populations have different 
     ways of complying. And we have to be very careful with risk-
     sharing. We're talking about lots of money. We're talking 
     about loaning more than $100 billion a year. We're talking 
     about $33 or $34 billion dollars a year to Pell Grants that 
     you don't have to pay back. So if we, on the loaning of $100 
     billion dollars a year, take some step, it will have a big 
     effect on the thousands institutions and millions of students 
     across the country. We want to be sure that we think about 
     what the unintended consequences might be.
       Today, when I'm done, I'm going back to the floor of the 
     Senate, where we are to complete work on our bill to fix No 
     Child Left Behind, which I've worked on with Senator Patty 
     Murray from Washington state, who is the senior Democrat on 
     the committee. That bill expired 7 years ago. Congress has 
     failed to fix it since then. I believe we're going to be 
     successful this year. The House has passed its version. We 
     will either pass our version today or early next week, and 
     then we'll put it together with the House and send it to the 
     president in a form that hopefully he can sign. This year 
     we're going to fix it. Then we're going to turn our attention 
     to a bipartisan Higher Education Act.
       I'm going to work on it with Senator Murray the same way we 
     worked on No Child Left Behind, which is that she and I will 
     first write a proposal and submit it to our very diverse 
     committee, which has 22 senators--Bernie Sanders and 
     Elizabeth Warren on one end, Rand Paul and Tim Scott on the 
     other end--so it's an interesting discussion we have every 
     time we get together. Every single one voted to report our No 
     Child Left Behind bill out of committee, which is a huge 
     success.
       But we've already got a bipartisan head start on the Higher 
     Education Act in two or three ways. Senator Michael Bennett 
     and I, and several senators of both parties have introduced 
     what we call the FAST Act to make a number of changes to make 
     it easier and simpler to apply for student aid. One of those 
     ``common sense'' ideas in addition to simplifying the number 
     of questions is to allow students to fill the form out in 
     their junior year of high school. This form requires you to 
     tell what your tax returns are before you file your tax 
     returns, so it throws 20 million families into confusion. If 
     you let people fill that out in their junior year of high 
     school, then they can use tax forms from a prior year, and 
     then they can have a full year to look at colleges and 
     universities, knowing in advance how much in grants or loans 
     they're eligible for.
       So that FAST Act has been introduced and examined 
     carefully. It has bipartisan support. We're planning to 
     introduce legislation with as many of the recommendations of 
     the Zeppos-Kirwan report on higher education on how to 
     simplify regulations. That would be a bipartisan start.
       Senator Burr, Senator Angus King, and a group of bipartisan 
     senators have introduced legislation on simplifying the 
     repayment form of student loans. There are 9 different ways 
     of repaying your student loans. Actually, it's a very 
     generous system. You can pay it off over ten years or by 
     paying no more than 10 percent of your disposable income, and 
     if that doesn't pay it off over twenty years, it's forgiven. 
     But the process is so complicated that most students don't 
     take advantage of it.
       So there are three steps already that we've taken. And we 
     have taken maybe the most important step of all, as we've 
     worked together this year in the great bipartisan way on our 
     committee to work on elementary and secondary education. 
     There's no reason we can't continue with higher education.
       I hope that Senator Murray and I can present our bill to 
     the full committee in September. As we've done with No Child 
     Left Behind, it will be a suggestion of how the

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     committee can work. And shortly thereafter, I hope that we 
     will report it to the floor. Senator McConnell is very 
     pleased with the debate on the Elementary and Secondary 
     Education Act--the fact that we're working on something so 
     important in a bipartisan way and want to get a result that's 
     good for the country. He told me last night that he's very 
     interested in our Higher Education Act and that he'll work to 
     find floor time for it. So I'm very optimistic about that and 
     look forward to it.
       Thank you very much.

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