Heidi Alexander: “if I may respond to the Senator from West Virginia. First, I wish to congratulate Senators Manchin and Burr for helping…”

“if I may respond to the Senator from West Virginia. First, I wish to congratulate Senators Manchin and Burr for helping the full Senate understand this issue. This is similar to a lot of issues we have to face. They are not simple. I used to be a college president and the U.S. Secretary of Education. I had to re-educate myself on this legislation. I still made some mistakes. I was saying last night, for example, that there were only 2 million subsidized loans. What I was forgetting was the point that the Senator from West Virginia makes, which is that 80 percent of the students who have subsidized loans, the low-income students, also have unsubsidized loans. So when we only take care of these subsidized loans, we are leaving 7 million students with unsubsidized loans out here hanging high and dry, and nobody is taking care of them. So we are hurting both the middle-class families and the low-income families when we have an incomplete solution. The Senator from West Virginia posed a question. Let's say I graduated from the University of Tennessee and I had two loans; I had a subsidized loan, which means the government paid my interest while I was in college. Typically, if I am similar to four out of five students, I also had an unsubsidized loan, so I accrued that interest. Suddenly the interest rates have gone up for me because the country's interest rates have gone up to 10 percent.…”