 I'll first recognize now Dr. Dynarski for your remarks, and then we'll go all the way through. Thank you. Chairwoman Davis, Ranking Member Smucker, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. College degree is one of the best investments a person can make. My dad was a high school dropout. I'm a college professor. I have seen firsthand the power of education to change people's lives. A bachelor's degree pays for itself several times over in the form of higher income, lower unemployment, and increased economic security. College graduates with a BA earn 80% more than those with just a high school degree. Within 10 years of college graduation, the typical BA recipient will have recouped the cost of attending college. Those who attend college without graduating seem much smaller benefits, especially for men the earnings of non-completers more closely resemble those of high school graduates than of college graduates. Rising student debt has shifted financial risk onto students and makes graduation even more important. Those who earn a BA rarely default on their loans. Most defaults are by non-completers. While college completion, college attendance has risen steadily. Degree attainment has stagnated. That's because half of college students drop out without earning a degree. As a result, only about 30% of adults have a BA. For those from the lowest income families, it's 10%. For black adults, it's 22%, and for Hispanic adults, it's 15%. Most people start college intending to earn a degree. Most do not succeed. The Department of Education projects a sharp increase in the number of college students who are black or Hispanic, while the number of white students will barely budge. Unless we increase completion rates for disadvantaged black and Latino students, we're looking at a sharp decrease in the education of our population. Completion rates vary dramatically by sector. The odds of graduating if you start out at a nonprofit four-year college are 76%, at a public four-year college 65%, at a community college 37%, and at a for-profit school 35%. At hundreds of schools, only one out of five students will graduate. At 300 colleges, students are more likely to default on their student loans than they are to get a degree. The very low completion rates at for-profits are especially troubling. Students attending for-profits take on much higher debt, and their farm are likely to default on their loans. That's because evidence shows that students don't get an earnings boost from attending a for-profit college. Now why do students drop out? Students with weaker academic preparation are more likely to drop out, unsurprisingly, but even well-prepared students drop out of college. For example, a high-performing student from a low-income family is no more likely to graduate college than a mediocre student from a high-income family. Part of this is financial insecurity. Students need to know that their college costs are covered in order to focus on their studies. Our complicated bureaucratic financial aid system often fails them. And more importantly, school quality matters. Better schools produce better outcomes. This is obvious when we're talking about K-12 education, which is free for students. Since it's free, we focus our policy discussions on how to make that free education a good education. For college, we are rightly concerned about affordability, and we talk about it quite a bit. But we can't stop there. An affordable school is worthless or even harmful if it doesn't provide a quality education. This shows that resources matter for college completion, especially for disadvantaged students, yet those with the greatest needs attend the schools with the fewest resources. In elementary and secondary education, we steer additional money and support towards students with the greatest need. Federal funding sends money to schools who teach English language learners, those with learning disabilities, and the economically disadvantaged. In college, the equation is flipped. Schools that enroll students with the greatest need get the fewest resources. At private universities, per pupil, instructional spending is about $45,000 a year. At community colleges, $10,000. Now we've got strong evidence about what works in increase in completion, and unsurprisingly, it costs something. At the City University of New York, the ASAP program more than doubled the graduation rate of community college students. Similar program in Ohio, similar success. These programs now serve tens of thousands of students. They cost a few thousand dollars per student per year, which still leaves community colleges spending far less than four-year colleges. Stable funding is critical for schools that they're to succeed, but when states face a budget crunch, it's typically the public colleges that get cut first. Spending in public colleges took a very hard hit during the recession. The result was decreased resources, higher tuition prices, and high dropout rates. Facing underfunded and overflowing public colleges, students turned in large numbers to for-profit colleges. They left those colleges with huge student debts and worthless credentials. This pattern is likely to repeat itself with the next recession, unless we make a change. We will see another spike in for-profit enrollment, another spike in student loan default, unless we consistently give our public colleges the resources they need to educate our students.