[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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