Making College More Affordable

On January 17, 2007, the United States House of Representatives debated legislation to reduce the interest rates on student loans (H.R. 5).  Congressman Todd Russell Platts delivered the following remarks on the floor of the House:

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the distinguished gentleman from California [Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon] for yielding to me.

Madam Speaker, I certainly support the underlying goal of this legislation about making higher education more affordable for our citizens, and I plan to support this legislation to move the process forward because it is an important goal we are after.

I know from personal experience the importance of student loans. I am probably one of the few Members of this Chamber that was elected while still paying for student loans. In fact, my wife and I could not have afforded our undergraduate degrees and our graduate degrees without the support of grants and loans, and we were delighted when we were able to pay the loans back a few short years ago.

While I support the underlying goal, however, I need to raise concerns about the manner in which we are attacking this issue and some of the substance of the issue.

First, the process. This bill has not been allowed to have committee hearings. There has been no opportunity for amendments in committee, and certainly no opportunity for amendments here on the floor. In fact, we have a closed rule, no amendments. If we had followed regular order and taken this bill through the committee process, we could have taken a bill with a good intent and made it a good piece of legislation on behalf of all of our Nation's citizens and done even better than we will do today.

I also need to address the failure of this legislation to address the reason that students are in need of more and higher student loans, the reason they need to borrow more and more, and that is ever-increasing tuition rates.

To the great credit of the distinguished gentleman from California, in previous years we sought to address that issue. He led the charge to try to work with the institutions of higher education across this country to be reasonable, to be responsible. This legislation does not address that at all.

I am often surprised when higher education institutions lobby for greater loan limits, and they don't disclose to their students the reason that they need higher loans is because those very institutions keep raising their tuition rates. This bill does not address that unfortunately.

I am also very disappointed that this bill does not address the ability of students to get into colleges, those up-front costs and the initial costs. This is about graduates who are in repayment. It does not help new students to help families get their children into school.

Unlike the Deficit Reduction Act, and this was addressed earlier by one of the previous speakers, that legislation actually gave additional assistance to students in going to school, significantly higher grant program amounts, I think over $5 billion in new grant programs; lower loan fees that the distinguished gentleman from California addressed, from 4 percent to 1 percent; higher loan limits for those early years of college.

It made it more affordable for students, especially low- and middle-class family students, to get into college and to pay their bills as they were in college. This bill does not address that.

Finally, while I certainly support the pay-as-you-go approach and voted in favor of that reform this past week, this bill achieves that goal in a gimmick fashion. The way it spreads out the reduction and pays for this is not true pay-as-you-go. And I think if we are going to do right by our citizens, in this case by those seeking and getting higher education opportunities, we need to make the tough decisions and truly pay for what we are providing in assistance.

I will vote in favor of this legislation to move the process forward, but I hope as it moves forward and we get to work with the Senate, that we will do much better in truly assisting the students who are trying to get into school or who are in school now with the cost of higher education. If we do so, as we have done in the past in some important ways with the Deficit Reduction Act, we truly will be about helping our Nation's students.