Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “I am so glad to be here; and I appreciate the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi's) willingness to put this group…”

“I am so glad to be here; and I appreciate the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi's) willingness to put this group together of the members of the 30-something, 10-year period. We each have a few more years to go. I want to piggyback on something you were just talking about related to the eligibility bar for financial aid. I can tell you just from personal experience all of the way back to when I was entering college and my parents were applying for financial aid for me; and the calculation, even back then, as to what we were eligible for and what the formula said that my parents could afford to pay and lay out that would come out of their pocket for college costs was unbelievable then. And now, with the changes in the financial aid formula today, I mean, even, I grew up in a middle-class family, you know, regular, average middle-class family, you know, not wealthy at all, parents who certainly did not live paycheck to paycheck but had a mortgage and car payments and credit card debt and, you know, pretty significant month- to-month bills. And none of that is taken into consideration when you calculate financial aid. I mean, those major expenses, other than your income, have nothing to do with the formula. So when they say, and back then the numbers were something like, my parents, based on their income, could be expected to pay $16,000 a year for my college education. Now, given all of the bills that they were struggling to pay for, there was no way.…”