On Wednesday’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made his pitch for legislation that would allow Americans with student loan debt to refinance it at a lower rate. The bill sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had failed to advance earlier in the day with a 56-38 vote on the Senate floor, needing 60 to continue.
“Daily Show” host Jon Stewart raised that the point that perhaps the colleges and universities receiving the loan money for costs of higher education that have regularly outpaced the rate of inflation for decades deserved some attention.
Schumer proposed a fix for that as well, which would be to penalize school that don’t keep their tuition costs within the range of inflation.
“When I went to college, my father was an exterminator and I was able to afford college from a family that didn’t have much money,” Schumer said. “If I was young today, I wouldn’t be able to afford it. And the cost has gone up much more than just about anything else. So there’s some talk of saying that colleges won’t get aid if their tuition goes up higher than the rate of inflation – so, we would impose that. Now, you have to make exceptions — what if they had a big building program or something like that. But we have to do something about the cost of college. It’s becoming … college on the one hand is becoming more and more of a necessity and it’s becoming less and less of reality to people because it’s so darn expensive that even people well into the middle class can’t afford it.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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