Heidi Alexander: “I recently spoke to Senate interns regarding the Financial Aid Simplification and Transparency Act. I ask unanimous…”

“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.…”