    [Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 10, 2018)]
    [House]
    [Page H90]
    From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                               STUDENT LOAN DEBT

      The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from
    Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
      Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, in today's Washington Post,
    there is a major story on the front page of the Style Section about a
    young woman name Sarah Pool.
      One of the headlines says: ``Sarah Pool, 31, has a baby and a job,
    and loves them both, but she fears she will be paying off student loans
    till the day she dies.''
      She got loans totaling $60,000 but now owes $69,000. She is quoted as
    saying: ``I keep paying, but it is like pouring into a bucket with no
    bottom.''
      Mr. Speaker, for several years, I have been speaking out about how
    harmful the Federal student loan program has become for many, many
    hundreds of thousands of students and families around this country.
      In May of 2015, I wrote an article for the Washington Examiner
    newspaper with ideas about how to bring down the cost of college. In
    that article, I quoted hedge fund manager James Altucher, who wrote:
    ``We are graduating a generation of indentured students.''
      An Ohio University economist, Richard Vedder, wrote a book several
    years ago entitled ``Going Broke By Degree.''
      In the February issue of Chronicles magazine, which will be out in
    just a few days, I have another article; and in that article I say that
    student loan debt in the United States is now $1.48 trillion. That
    incredible sum is a heavy drag on the economy and a burden on young
    people, and Federal intervention in education is the cause.
      It wasn't always this way.
      In June of 1965, I began working as a salesman at the Sears store in
    Knoxville, receiving a 10-cents-an-hour raise over my job as a bag boy
    at the A&P. At Sears, my wage was $1.25 an hour. I was required to wear
    a suit and tie, and I was very proud of that job.
      I worked full time that summer and usually around 20 hours a week
    after I began my freshman year at the University of Tennessee in late
    September.
      After I had worked at Sears for 6 months--I didn't realize I had been
    there 6 months--I was called to the office for the first time. I was
    very concerned, to put it lightly. I met David Weaver, who was my same
    age, 18, at the escalator. I told him: I bet I was hit by one of those
    Hallmark shoppers--one of the mystery shoppers Sears had at the time.
    He told me he had just been called by a very angry woman to whom he had
    sold the wrong color of paint. David said that he was scared and that
    he had diabetes, and when he got too nervous, he would pass out. I can
    remember that conversation as if it happened yesterday.
      Much to our relief, we had been called to the office so management
    could give us good news: because we had been working at Sears for 6
    months, they were giving us a nickel-an-hour raise.
      It shocks students at the University of Tennessee today when I tell
    them that tuition my freshman year was $90 per quarter, $270 for the
    academic year. By my senior year, it was $405. I remember hearing our
    minority leader, Mr. Hoyer, say that when he started at the University
    of Maryland, it was $87 a semester. Almost no one left college in those
    days with debt unless they had bought a car or made some other major
    purchase. Students certainly did not go into debt for tuition because
    they could all work part time, as I did, and pay all their school
    expenses.
      Now, over 44 million Americans carry student loan debt--some of those
    debts reaching into the six figures.
      Readers Digest recently published an article in the December/January
    issue entitled ``The Student Debt Racket.'' The authors quote one
    student who owes $90,000 as saying: ``My loans are a black cloud
    hanging over me. I am a student debt slave.''
      Colleges and universities began heavily promoting student loans in
    the late sixties and early seventies. They were able to tamp down
    opposition to tuition and fee increases by telling students: Don't
    worry, we will just get you a loan.
      Then, because loans were available, many schools began raising
    tuition at two and three times the rate of inflation each year, and
    have continued to do so.
      I remember reading an article about 3 years ago in The Post which
    said that student tuition had gone up 4\1/2\ times the rate of
    inflation since 1985. Now the cost of higher education has soared to
    such great heights that universities are bragging if they hold the
    annual increases to 2 or 3 percent. They never consider reductions, not
    even miniscule ones. Thus we have another example of how Big Government
    liberalism helps the few at the top while harming the many down below.
      The Federal student loan program has made the owners of some loan
    servicing companies very wealthy and has been a boon to most college
    administrators and tenured professors; and all of this at great expense
    to students and their families.

      When the Knoxville News Sentinel lists the highest paid people in
    east Tennessee each year, they are almost all at TVA or UT. Yet the
    pattern continues to repeat: Liberals find a very small group of people
    who are having trouble paying for something, then insist that the only
    solution is to let the Federal Government ``help.'' But whenever the
    Federal Government subsidizes something, the costs simply explode
    because most of the incentives or pressures to hold costs down vanish.
      Finally, Mr. Speaker, I would say this is why Mark Cuban, the Shark
    Tank star, has said: If you want to make college really expensive, make
    it free.

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