Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, the chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee, Mr. Miller, for his work on this and other education issues, as well as my other colleagues.
It is interesting to hear people talk about the fact that this does not totally reduce the cost of going to college when, for the past many years, this body has not delivered on that commitment to the American people.
In the last campaign, we did make a commitment to reduce the cost of going to college, and this bill is a follow-through on that commitment, and we will reduce the cost. We know in this country that one of the greatest impediments we have to people getting ahead is the burden of the cost of college tuition, a burden that has risen dramatically over the years.
Right now, many students who graduate from college are faced with a big debt burden that takes a long time to retire, and even worse than that is the number of students who are deterred from even going to college in the first place because of the cost of going to college and the debts they will incur. This bill takes a significant step toward reducing that burden and opening up the doors of opportunities.
We lose some of the very best and brightest in this country who have the ambition to go out and learn, who are qualified to go out there, who have done the work and gotten the grades, and because of the high costs are prohibited from going forward. In fact, about 4.4 million students are essentially deterred from going to college it is estimated over the next 10 years as a result of these high costs.
So, yes, during the last campaign this was a very, very important issue to the American people. Instead of raising the costs of going to college, instead of cutting $13 billion from higher education as was done in the last Congresses, we said, we are going to turn that around; we are going to make it easier for people to go to college; we are going to open the doors of opportunity, not just because it is the right thing to do to make sure that every individual has the opportunity to reach his or her full potential, but because our Nation needs to make sure we do that in this competitive era.