Russ Feingold: College students should be able to graduate without debt

As an incoming freshman at UW-Madison, I was 18 years old, the Bee Gees had the No. 1 single, “All in the Family” had just debuted earlier that year, and my college tuition bill was $451.

This past week, over four decades later, I helped a family friend’s 18-year-old son move into a dorm room on the UW-Madison campus in the same residence hall.

As a Wisconsin resident, his total costs for the first year will be $24,735, and though his parents both work, the only way he can pay the full tab is with the help of student loans.

As I traveled across all of Wisconsin’s 72 counties this summer, I asked people to tell me about their economic situation — could they pay the bills? Did they have money left over for extraordinary expenses such as an auto repair or a daughter’s wedding? Over and over, I heard more about the challenge of paying back student loans than I heard concerns about any other single household expense.

Parents told me their kids had no choice but to take out loans — because these days, paying tuition bills in cash could be considered a financial fantasy on par with a vacation house in the Caribbean. And graduating students told me their post-college plans weren’t always focused on starting a new life for themselves. More and more, post-college plans started and ended with the question of how to pay off their student loans.

This has real-world consequences for Wisconsin’s young people. All across our state, newly-graduated young adults are delaying plans to buy a home, open a business or start a family. Seven in 10 Wisconsinites graduating in 2013 had student debt, carrying an average balance of over $28,000. Nationally, student debt is now an economic crisis, totaling nearly $1.2 trillion of debt.

For former students still carrying student loans, Congress could act now by making student loans subject to refinancing, just like we do with mortgages. There’s already legislation in both the House and Senate to do just that. And while my likely opponent in the race for U.S. Senate next year voted against it twice, I support it and urge the Senate to pass it.

But most of our energy should be focused on our next generation of students. To build a strong economy in the 21st century that works for everyone, a college education must be available to those students who study hard to get there, regardless of their economic status. That’s why I believe we must build a system that allows Wisconsin’s future students to graduate without debt from our world-class public institutions. Such a system must require hard work and accountability from everyone — from students, schools and even from states. They must be on the hook to support their institutes of higher education.

Unfortunately, some politicians, such as Wisconsin’s incumbent Republican senator, still don’t get it. He says his tuition at the University of Minnesota wasn’t a problem because he just worked his way through college. Yet we’re about the same age — which means his tuition was only about $600.

That’s great for him, but what about the rest of Wisconsin? In his world, unless you come from a privileged family, you and your kids are probably out of luck, because he’s repeatedly said he opposes all government-assisted student loans.

Today, our Bee Gees records have thankfully gone the way of history’s dust bin. But just as it was in the fall of 1971, a college degree is still one of America’s most direct paths to achieving the American dream for the students who work for it. Yet as costs rise, and unless we act, it will become a path that’s exclusively for the rich.