Michael Bennet: “during the worst recession since the Great Depression, which we are now fortunately coming out of, the highest the…”

“during the worst recession since the Great Depression, which we are now fortunately coming out of, the highest the unemployment rate we ever got, even at the depths of that recession, for people with a college degree was 4.5 percent. We saw unemployment rates of 18 percent, 20 percent for certain groups of people--4.5 percent if one is a college graduate. It seems to me, first of all, that is an incredible stress test of the value of a college degree in this 21st century in which we are living. We ought to be making it easier, not harder, for students to go to college. However, as we know, interest rates on Federal student loans are scheduled to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1, unless Congress can get out of its own way and do what is right. For the life of me, I don't know why we cannot come to an agreement. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. The cost of college has increased 550 percent since 1985. Two-thirds of students in this country rely on loans to afford college. In the past decade, average student loan debt has increased by more than 25 percent. This, by the way, is not a function of people not doing the right thing. It is a function of the fact that median family income has continued to decline in this country for the first time in this country's history, while the cost of college has escalated like crazy.…”