[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 12064]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             COLLEGE COSTS

  (Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute.)
  Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. The National Journal today noted that 
borrowing accounts for 18 percent of how the average family pays for 
college. They also noted that majors vary considerably in terms of 
their cost, such as social science being about $28,000 and engineering 
around $25,000.
  What's notable is the starting salaries for a number of majors is so 
low that students cannot pay back their loans.
  What is also noteworthy is the cost of the actual tuition itself. 
Since the 1970s, when data first began to be gathered, college tuition 
costs have gone up 1,120 percent, while inflation itself has gone up a 
little over 200 percent.
  As we're talking about the cost of college, it is very important, Mr. 
Speaker, that we also call upon colleges themselves to be responsible 
for trimming costs and for guidance counselors and colleges to also 
look at how they are advising students to move forward in their 
careers. An important part of this argument is how students are saddled 
with a great deal of debt that they can't repay because they simply are 
not in a major in which they can earn money, and how colleges spend so 
much on a number of amenities that have little to do with education.
  So I hope that universities, themselves, look at how they can trim 
their costs instead of continuing to raise tuition on the students, who 
then are faced with a lifelong burden.

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