Chris Dodd: “I rise to introduce the College Saver's Credit Act, a bill designed to open the dream of higher education to many more…”

“I rise to introduce the College Saver's Credit Act, a bill designed to open the dream of higher education to many more Americans. Few choices in life have the economic consequence as the decision to enter college. Compare college-educated workers to their high-school-educated peers: those with a college diploma will earn $1 million more over the course of a lifetime than their peers without one. That million-dollar difference lays bare the power in college access. And yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of young men and women who want to choose a college education, and cannot. These young men and women are prepared to enter into our college-educated middle class--prepared in intellect, prepared in maturity, prepared in ambition--and are shut out by the cost of tuition. This year, 400,000 high school seniors whose families have low or moderate incomes will be priced out of college. Of those, nearly 200,000 will never attend college at all. They will lose their chance at higher education, and as a consequence, they will face almost twice the odds of unemployment. And unless we take action, the number of excluded Americans is only likely to increase. Over the past 10 years, the cost of attending a 4-year public college has increased by more than $2,800, or 96 percent, and the cost of attending a four-year private college has increased by more than $9,000, or 71 percent. These costs continue to rise today.”