Dick Durbin: “life is about choices. We make them all the time, the choice about where you are going to school, what you are going to…”

“life is about choices. We make them all the time, the choice about where you are going to school, what you are going to study, what you are going to do with the rest of your life, what kind of job you want, your car, a lot of other choices we make. Tomorrow the Senate gets to make a choice. It is going to affect some people. Here is the choice: We have in this country a serious problem with college loan debt. It has grown dramatically over the last several decades. Now we estimate the total amount of college loan debt in America is over $1.2 trillion. What does that mean? How big is that? More college loan debt than the sum total of all credit card debt in America. More college debt than the sum total of all automobile debt in America. The only other debt larger--mortgage debt. This is growing, the college student loan debt. Forty million families are affected by student loan debt out of a nation of 300 million. So we are dealing with somewhere in the range of 14, 15 percent of America making payments on college student loans. The amount of debt has grown dramatically. I will not come to the floor and tell you what I borrowed to go to school because it makes me sound ancient. But I will tell you this: When I graduated from law school, my student debt equaled one-half of my gross income the first year, just to put it in perspective. Not so anymore.…”