Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we have been hearing really two debates around here the last few days--in fact, over the last few days and months--about student loans. Both are important, but they are separate, and I think they need to be separate and thought of as two separate debates as we consider the issue before us this afternoon. The first and larger issue is the cost of college. It is too high. Everyone agrees to that. In fact, the cost of college--of higher education--has exploded in the last 30 years. In a former life, I used to interview people for a living on television. In the 1980s I interviewed the financial aid officer at one of our Maine colleges. He made a very interesting point. He said: Angus, if you look back over the last 40 or 50 years, the cost of a private college education in the United States has almost exactly tracked the cost of a new Ford automobile. In the 1950s, $1,500 bought a car and a college education. In the 1960s, about $3,000 bought a car and a college education. That relationship continued into the 1990s. Then something happened because today a new Ford is about $18,000 and a private college is approaching $60,000, something like $58,000. That is a real problem for all of us. It is a problem for parents. It is a problem for students. It is a problem for the government that supplies the loans. It is a problem for Pell grants. It is a problem for all of us. It is one we need to discuss. But that is not the issue before us today.…”