[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11601-11602]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           FINANCIAL AID SIMPLIFICATION AND TRANSPARENCY ACT

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I recently spoke to Senate interns 
regarding the Financial Aid Simplification and Transparency Act. I ask 
unanimous consent that my full speech be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

           Financial Aid Simplification and Transparency Act

       Thank you for coming. We know it's the pizza more than 
     anything else that brought you here, but to some extent it 
     may be the dreaded federal student application form. What we 
     would like to do today is tell you a story. We will call this 
     a ``teaching moment.'' I think that may have been Senator 
     Bennet's phrase, but it is a teaching moment for you as to 
     how legislation is supposed to work in the United States 
     Senate. And I think it may be a teaching moment for senators, 
     about how to do our jobs.
       We are going to tell you a story of how we got to where we 
     are and tell you what our proposal is. And then we are going 
     to invite the experts to tell us what kind of students we 
     senators have been in terms of listening to them and then 
     coming up with something. Then we will ask you what you 
     think. Then we are going to put this out for our committee on 
     which we serve, which Senator Harkin is the chairman of, 
     which is working on the reauthorization of Higher Education 
     with our colleagues to see if we can get co-sponsors and make 
     a difference in something. So what I will do is begin the 
     story, and I will just take a few minutes. Then I will turn 
     it over to Senator Bennet, and he will tell you more about 
     exactly what the proposal is. First, let me introduce the 
     three experts: Ms. Kim Cook, executive director of the 
     National College Access Network, Dr. Judith Scott-Clayton, 
     assistant professor of economics and education at Teachers 
     College at Columbia University, and Ms. Kristin Conklin, 
     founding partner at HCM Strategists, LLC.
       Here's why they are here. Several months ago at one of the 
     hearings of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions 
     Committee, those three, and one other, who is from Harvard 
     Graduate School of Education, testified before us. I am down 
     on the Republican side and Michael is on the Democratic side. 
     It looked to me like we had the same reaction, because they 
     were talking about this federal student application form, 
     which is 106 questions, with 68 pages of explanations that 
     you have to fill out every year you apply for a grant or a 
     loan.
       It gets audited during the year, and, of course, you would 
     probably make a mistake on one of those questions, so you 
     might not get your money. It is so discouraging to people who 
     apply for it that many who should do not. One of the 
     community college representatives said that a quarter of the 
     community college students do not even fill out the form, and 
     they are probably the ones who we most want to have the 
     opportunity to do that.
       So what we heard the four say was you could eliminate all 
     those questions except two and get 90 or 95 percent of all of 
     the information that you need.
       Of course I am the first one to wonder, ``Is that just a 
     bizarre outlier? Is that just one witness with a weird 
     proposal?'' But every single one of the four said that. Then 
     they went on to make some other very common sense 
     recommendations about being able to fill it out earlier in 
     your high school year, suggestions about over-borrowing, 
     about simplifying the loan and student repayment process--all 
     of which made a lot of sense.
       So, at the end of the hearing, I said, ``Would four of you 
     please write a letter to us on the things that you agree 
     with?'' By the time I got down to see them, they said, ``We 
     won't write you four letters, we'll write you one.'' So they 
     did.
       Michael and I began working together to see if we could 
     take their recommendations and put it in a piece of 
     legislation. In doing that, we wanted to show the proper 
     respect to our colleagues, so we let our chairman, Senator 
     Harkin, know about it. We mentioned it to Arne Duncan, so he 
     would know what we are doing, because we would like in the 
     end to have Republican support, and the president's support, 
     and the House of Representatives' support. We are not here to 
     make a political point. We are here to get a result. And then 
     we thought about what would be the best way to introduce it. 
     Senator Bennet said, ``Why don't we invite the interns to 
     come over for lunch? Why don't we lay it out to them? Why 
     don't we ask the experts who suggested it to us what they 
     think?''
       Next week, then, we will introduce it and see what is going 
     on and how we can improve it over the next few weeks. And 
     then maybe when you fill out the form in your next year of 
     college, it will be the size of a postcard instead of the 
     size of that. That thing takes, if you add it up, 20 million 
     students filling that out every year, and the form itself 
     says it takes at least three hours. If you add up the amount 
     of money and time spent on that, you get into billions of 
     hours wasted, you get into hundreds of millions of dollars 
     that might be spent on construction, instead of hiring staff 
     people at the college to help you fill these things out. You 
     might encourage a lot more people, who are eligible and who 
     need the money, to get the surest step toward improving their 
     lives.
       Of course, the College Board says that a college four-year 
     degree is worth a million dollars in increased earnings over 
     your lifetime. It is one sure ticket to a better life that we 
     know about. Finally, I want to say

[[Page 11602]]

     that it has been a great pleasure to work with Michael. I am 
     a pretty good Republican, he's a pretty good Democrat, but 
     that does not make any difference. The reason we are here is 
     that the Senate is a place where you are supposed to have 
     extended debate about important subjects until you come to a 
     consensus, and then you get a result. That is the way you 
     govern a complex country. So what we hope is that this is 
     just a small example of one part of the Higher Education 
     reauthorization process that will help make life simpler.
       Michael, there is one other thing that I should say. You 
     may ask, how did this happen? How did this long thing happen? 
     It wasn't any evil-doer who did it. What happened was the 
     Higher Education Act was authorized in 1965. In my opinion, 
     what happened was it got reauthorized eight times by 
     different groups of senators and congressman, different group 
     of regulators wrote things. People had good, well-intentioned 
     ideas and after that [process], you get that. So what we are 
     doing is starting from scratch to try to turn 106 questions 
     into a postcard and get the money where it should go, to the 
     eligible students who want to go to college.

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