[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 25 (Thursday, February 11, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S871-S872]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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             NATIONAL COUNCIL OF HIGHER EDUCATION RESOURCES

 Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the 
Record a copy of my remarks last week to the National Council of Higher 
Education Resources.
  The material follows:

             National Council of Higher Education Resources

       I was smiling a little bit when you said that I probably 
     knew more than anybody in Congress about student loans. That 
     is probably true, but that may not be saying very much. This 
     is a complex subject. And although I have been in and around 
     it for a long time, I still spend most of my time listening 
     and learning from you and others who deal with how we help 
     students take advantage of the tremendous opportunities they 
     have in this country.
       I'm sure some of you were up late last night watching 
     politics. I went to bed early, but 20 years ago I was right 
     in the middle of it. When you have the privilege of running 
     for president, you find out that you spend most of your time 
     hoping nobody says to you what they said to the late Mo 
     Udall--the congressman from Arizona--when he was walking into 
     a barbershop in New Hampshire and he stuck out his hand and 
     said ``I'm Mo Udall running for president,'' and the barber 
     says, ``yeah I know, we were just laughing about that 
     yesterday.''
       I watched with interest the results this morning--my 
     sideline view is that Marco Rubio is somebody to watch in the 
     next week. Twenty years ago, about two weeks before the New 
     Hampshire primary, I was at 10 percent in New Hampshire 
     polls, and I came in third in Iowa as Marco did last night. 
     26% Dole 23% Buchanan and I got 18. That 18 was such a 
     surprise I ended up on the cover of Time magazine and was in 
     first in New Hampshire within the week. So things can change 
     rapidly, and what happens in the 8 days between the Iowa 
     caucuses and the New Hampshire primary should be very 
     interesting--I have no idea what will happen.
       I do think that 20 years ago it was said to be 3 out of 
     Iowa, and 2 out of New Hampshire. And the financial limits on 
     fundraising were such that it made that come true because you 
     could only raise money from people up to $1000 a person. You 
     can imagine trying to raise millions of dollars at $1000 per 
     person. You can't start a business that way, you can't start 
     a college that way and you

[[Page S872]]

     can't have a presidential campaign that way. So it was 3 out 
     of Iowa and 2 out of New Hampshire.
       I think this time they are going to carry 4 out of New 
     Hampshire. And one reason is because the rules have changed 
     about fundraising. So hopefully more Americans will have a 
     chance to participate in the system and will get a chance to 
     run through the southern primaries and on into the 
     convention. So it ought to be an interesting year.
       I'd like to talk just a minute about higher education and 
     some of the things that I hope we could do. Then I'll be glad 
     to take up to 3 questions you'd like to ask me. I'll be glad 
     and try to respond to them if there's something you want to 
     say to me. First--thank you for the work you do to help 
     students have a chance to participate in what still is the 
     best system of colleges and universities in the world. We 
     have millions of families every year who still fill out their 
     student aid application forms. It's a large number.
       Here is what our committee, which is the Senate's education 
     committee, will be doing. As Ron said, for the last year our 
     major priority was elementary and secondary education. We 
     tackled fixing No Child Left Behind which was 7 years 
     overdue, and filled with partisan problems. It's like higher 
     education but even more so. In fact--with elementary and 
     secondary education it's like going to a University of 
     Tennessee football game--you've got 100,000 people in the 
     stands and every single one of them played football and is an 
     expert and knows what plays to call and usually wants to call 
     it. Well it's the same thing with elementary and secondary 
     education--you have 50 million students, and 3.5 million 
     teachers and parents. And everybody has got an idea--whether 
     it's transgender bathrooms--they all want to put it in the 
     bill. But all these things could sink the bill in a minute. 
     And I will compliment Senator Patty Murray of Washington 
     because she and I worked together and we got a result and the 
     president to sign the bill. Fundamentally, it was a major 
     change because it basically says ``sure we want to know how 
     the students are doing so the federal government will require 
     you to take 17 tests between the 3rd grade and senior year.''
       Then you report that to see how the students are doing. And 
     you disaggregate it so you can see if the African American 
     kids or the white kids or the Latino kids are being left 
     behind. But after that, the decisions about what to do about 
     the results of the tests--if you're a 4th grade teacher in 
     Franklin--that's your business. That's the state of 
     Tennessee's business. So if you want the common core academic 
     standard you can have it. If you don't want it then you don't 
     have to have it. That's not anything the United States 
     Secretary of Education is going to tell you. It's not going 
     to tell you what the test should be, how to evaluate the 
     test, what the accountability system should be and how to 
     evaluate the teachers.
       People assume that because I have been a big fan of 
     evaluating teachers as Governor that I'll come up here and 
     try to make everybody do it. It's just the reverse with me. I 
     think people are fed up with Washington telling them so much 
     about what to do--whether it's elementary and secondary 
     education or in higher education. My goal with higher 
     education is to try to deregulate it. Try to take the federal 
     rules and regulations which just piled up through 8 different 
     reauthorizations of the Higher Education Act, and simplify 
     them and make them more fair. Several years ago I got an 
     appropriations bill; a study for how to do that with 
     research, and the head of the University of Texas at Austin, 
     chancellor, former chancellor now, had them update me a 
     report. I asked the chancellor of Maryland and the chancellor 
     at Vanderbilt to lead a group of higher education folks to 
     recommend how we could make higher education more simple and 
     effective: 59 recommendations. A few of them the Secretary 
     himself can do. As many as we can, maybe 3 dozen of the rest 
     of those, we hope to put in a piece of legislation that Sen. 
     Mikulski and Bennet from the Democratic side, and Sen. Burr 
     and from the Republican side will introduce. They all will 
     help to save the time and money from this jungle of redtape 
     the study would have.
       Another simplification we would like to do is with the 
     FAFSA. You know better than almost anybody that it's not 
     necessary to have 108 questions. In fact we had testimony 
     before our committee from people that come from many 
     different directions that said basically you only need 2 
     questions. One was ``the size of your family?'' and one was 
     ``your amount of income.'' Well, maybe we don't need only 2 
     questions, but we need a lot fewer questions. I mean you have 
     20 million families filling that out every year. That's an 
     enormous savings of time and money. And if we simplify and 
     demystify the forms to some degree more students will take 
     advantage of the student aid enrollment. The president of 
     Southwest Community College in Memphis told me he thinks he 
     loses 1,500 students every year just from the complexity of 
     the FAFSA. And so we are experimenting in a whole variety of 
     ways. Parents and grandparents asking, ``why do I have to 
     give this info to the government again, they've already got 
     it on my FAFSA?'' Well, good question. Maybe all you need to 
     do is give permission to the IRS to send it over and you fill 
     out only a few questions. So, simplifying for FAFSA is 
     another thing we have a bipartisan agreement on.
       We'd like reduce the number of student loans. I'd like to 
     see a single undergraduate loan. I think students would be 
     less likely to over borrow and less likely to make mistakes. 
     And we could use the savings from that to provide another 
     thing that I think would be helpful and that's the year-round 
     Pell Grant. We have ridiculously complex student aid and 
     student aid repayment terms. I saw the other day, Bernie 
     Sanders had some person up there holding up a sign that said 
     she had $90K in student loans and she was paying half of her 
     income to pay it off every year. Well, as an undergraduate 
     loan she doesn't have to do that.
       If she knew what the existing income-based repayment 
     programs are, she wouldn't have to pay half of her income 
     toward loans, she would only have to pay 10 or 15 % of her 
     income towards it. If she had been working for public service 
     she might have it forgiven. After 20 to 25 years it would be 
     forgiven. So there's a lot of misinformation about student 
     loans and about repayment and our goal is to cut it down to 
     two. To have a 10 year repayment plan and have an income 
     based repayment plan. So you would have two choices.
       Fundamentally, if students knew what their options were and 
     that they were that simple to understand, we'd probably have 
     a lot more students take advantage of those repayment plans 
     and on the front end a lot more students going to college. 
     There are other steps we'd like to take.
       The ones I have just described have a lot of bipartisan 
     agreement. We'd like to allow students to use their income 
     from two years ago, called the prior-prior year, to use to 
     fill out their financial aid forms. The administration agrees 
     with us on that. Other areas where we may be able to have a 
     bipartisan agreement on in the Senate are campus safety and 
     sexual assault, accreditation reform, giving institutions 
     more authority to counsel students on how much to borrow as a 
     way to reduce over borrowing. Having institutions have some 
     skin in the game (or risk sharing) as a way to reduce over 
     borrowing. So those are some of the areas where we should be 
     able to have bipartisan support.
       Now what can we actually get done this year?--My goal is as 
     I've said to the group earlier, the tax payers will pay our 
     salaries this year, and I think we ought to just continue to 
     work. Our number one priority is oversight on the elementary 
     and secondary education bill we passed last year. The bill's 
     not worth the paper it's printed on unless it's implement 
     properly and I don't want the Department of Education 
     granting back to itself all the decision making authority we 
     pushed out of Washington and to the states and classroom 
     teachers. So we're going to be watching that very closely and 
     having a number of hearings.
       Number two--we have a very important biomedical innovation 
     research bill. There's never been a more important time for 
     scientific research The House has passed, the president's 
     interested in precision medicine and cancer research. We have 
     a genius, Francis Collins, heading the National Institutes of 
     Health. We want to do our part. So that's going to take some 
     time.
       The third of three top priorities is reauthorization of 
     Higher Education Act.
       Maybe we can do it all this year. This year is challenging 
     because it's not only an election year, it's a presidential 
     election year. So we have some really interesting proposals 
     on higher education from some of the candidates. You've heard 
     those. And those could box things up in the Senate as we try 
     to deal with them.
       But we're going to go ahead and take some of these 
     proposals that I've just described, and bring them through 
     our committee, pass them in the House of Representatives, and 
     look for opportunities to bring them to the Senate floor.
       I'm really proud of what we did in elementary and secondary 
     education. Because I think it's really good policy. It's 
     carefully written, it was vetted by everybody who is involved 
     in the education system, and I think it will govern 
     elementary and secondary education for the next 15-20 years 
     because it will be difficult to change.
       I'd like to do the same thing for higher education. Over 
     the last eight reauthorizations, the stack of regulations has 
     gone like that. I'd like to start the stack of regulations 
     going downward like that. I'd like your advice as we begin to 
     do it.

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