Press Releases

Today, House Committee Education and Labor Democrats passed the so-called College Affordability Act. This partisan legislation will contribute to exploding college costs, exacerbate our nation’s skills gap, and allow failing programs to go unchecked. This approach will force students to spend more to learn less.
 
“Students and families can no longer afford the status quo. The same tired idea of throwing more money into the existing system and hoping that this time things will be different is the very definition of insanity. Government overreach and unnecessary intervention has contributed to a bloated postsecondary education sector at the expense of students,” Republican Leader Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said during debate on the legislation. “My Democrat friends across the aisle seem to have missed this lesson and instead double down on this failing notion. A representative of the higher education sector has weighed in and said that the so-called College Affordability Act will ‘increase the cost of doing business for most institutions.’ Republicans know – and Democrats should know – that this cost won’t be borne by schools, but like any other business will instead get passed to consumers in the form of higher tuition and fees. We can do better.”

Specifically, the Democrats’ legislation will:

• Give tens of billions of dollars to colleges and faculty union members instead of investing directly in students and trusting students and families to know what college option is best for them.
• Stifle innovation and fail to recognize competency-based education and other alternative education models that would increase completion rates, lower college costs, and better equip students for the needs of today’s workforce.
• Expand the federal government’s role in higher education to limit academic freedom, turn state and institutional decisions over to the Secretary, violate student privacy, and publicly shame those entities expressing constitutionally protected rights.

Committee Republicans offered commonsense proposals, but: 

• Democrats defended public service loan forgiveness for lobbyists.
• Democrats refused to protect babies born alive in college health care facilities.
• Democrats voted to make sure the wealthy get free college.
• Democrats denied First Amendment protections for religious institutions.
• Democrats pushed a debt cancellation scheme that robs from the poor to pay for the rich.