WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), today questioned higher education officials during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing on making college more affordable, and discussed his bipartisan legislation (S. 1121) to provide students and parents with more information about tuition and higher education outcomes so they can make more informed choices about their futures.
Key excerpts of Cassidy’s remarks are transcribed below.
CASSIDY: College tuition is going up … which is not sustainable. Students are being burdened with debt for decades and oftentimes have no information about their likelihood of paying off that debt.
And taxpayers will be burdened, paying $36 billion in shortfalls related to student loan default.
We have a College Transparency Act, which is Hatch, Cassidy, Warren and Whitehouse, which creates a student-level data network to have more complete, accurate information on all students and outcomes. …
It streamlines reporting requirements for colleges … saving colleges time and money, and decreasing burdens on current reporting. … It’s a better system which allows students to better know their return on investment.
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