Alexander Statement on Today’s Student Loan Vote

WASHINGTON, July 10 – Senator Lamar Alexander, the senior Republican on the Senate’s education committee today released the following statement about the Senate voting down a student loan proposal supported by some Democrats:

“Today’s vote was the failure of a bad idea—the Senate voted against a short-term political fix that would have left 7 million middle-income students twisting in the wind and helped low-income students for just one year. We must focus our attention now on a long-term solution such as the president supports, the House of Representatives has passed, and a group of Republican, Democratic, and Independent senators have proposed.”

Earlier today, Alexander spoke about student loan rates on the Senate floor. (Video HERE.) Alexander said then: “Eighty percent of students who have subsidized loans, the low-income students, also have the unsubsidized loans. When you only take care of these subsidized loans, you’re leaving 7 million students with unsubsidized loans up here high and dry and nobody’s taking care of them. You’re hurting both the middle-income families and the low-income families when you have an incomplete solution.”

# # #