Today the Subcommittee on Oversight will examine an important and timely topic: access to and affordability of higher education.
Study after study has documented how a higher education helps Americans get good-paying jobs, support a decent home, and comfortably raise a family. Higher education is a gateway to the middle class.
Yet for many young people, especially those of color and from low-income backgrounds, significant barriers to higher education exist. Those barriers may have even multiplied during this pandemic.
Thanks to Congressman Jimmy Gomez and Senator Bob Menendez, our bill to make student loan debt forgiveness tax-free through 2025 passed in the American Rescue Plan. But we need to examine how else we can help students.
Are we targeting the students most in need of aid?
Are there better ways to use the tax code to enable students, especially low-income ones, to receive higher education?
And we also face a titanic crisis hanging over a generation of college graduates: crippling student loan debt.
Student loan debt totals approximately $1.7 trillion. The average debt load of America’s 45 million student borrowers is $38,000. This often delays recent graduates from buying homes, starting families, and moving into the middle class. It is a challenge of our time.
We must understand why the costs of college are outpacing other costs in the economy. And we must offer more relief to those struggling to pay for their education.
As we return to normalcy, it is also appropriate to look at how the pandemic has affected our institutions of higher learning.
New burdens have been placed on them. From COVID testing to the expansion of online learning, we must explore how the pandemic affected our higher educational institutions, including their ability to provide an affordable education to all students.
To help us understand, we have an impressive panel of witnesses. All experts in these matters. I thank them for coming and look forward to their testimony.
But first, I will yield five minutes to Ranking Member Mike Kelly for his opening statement.
