 Dr. Donarski, welcome. Thank you. Chairman Alexander, Ranking Mayor Murray, members of the committee, thanks for the opportunity to testify today. First thing I want to say is that I'm a first-generation college grad. My dad was a high school dropout. Expanding opportunity for low-income students motivates my work and everything I say today. So that's what underpins all my recommendations. I'm going to be focusing on what we can learn from other countries in repaying student loans. But I want to first express my strong support for simplifying the aid process for students. And when I say for students, I mean where they actually meet the student aid system is where we need to change things if it's going to be more effective in getting more students into college. So the US student debt has risen sharply over the past few decades. But we should be clear, the typical undergraduate debt is not what we see in the headlines. For those who don't complete a BA, half the students who don't actually complete a BA, debt is less than $10,000. For those who do complete a BA, it's about $30,000. And only 15% of those who complete a BA actually end up with more than $30,000. Just 2% of undergrads end up borrowing more than $50,000. Now, borrowing for college is common around the world. In Sweden, where they don't even have any tuition charged at all, people still borrow to pay their living expenses, about $20,000 for their university education. In Australia, it's about $22,000. In England, about $70,000 for the typical university graduate. So it's exceptional that the US is not the borrowing levels, but the default rates. Other countries, in other countries, loans do not send millions of borrowers into financial distress. In the US, loan distress is concentrated among those who borrow just a few thousand dollars to attend a for-profit or a community college. It's the smaller loans that go into default, not the larger ones. When fees and interests and penalties get piled on to small balances, they can balloon into much larger debt and then end up in default. Now, default is very costly. It does enormous damage to borrowers' credit ratings. It leads to higher interest rates on credit cards, on cars, employers regularly check credit reports of their applicants and so do landlords. So defaulting on a loan is devastating to a person's financial life. We need to stop student debt from ruining people's lives. So I'm gonna tell you what other countries do to make their debt work. First, they allow borrowers to spread their payments over more years. In the US, the standard repayment period is 10 years. Sweden, 25, Germany, 20, England, 30, Australia, there's no time limit at all. I know of no other country that has a repayment period as short as ours. But more importantly, in Australia and in England, loan payments change with earnings. Payments are deducted from paychecks, rising and falling along with pay. This is like the system used in the US to collect social security contributions and other payroll taxes. In England, there are no loan payments at income below 30,000, and then they're 9% of income. So it works out that if your annual income's about 50,000, your payments are about 150 per month. In Australia, the loan payment is 4% of all income. Works out about the same. You don't pay until your earnings hit $46,000 and then around $150 a month again. In both countries, the key is that loan payments change automatically with paychecks, just like our payroll taxes and income taxes do. If pay drops, we pay less in payroll taxes, automatically. In fact, we'd be pretty annoyed if our hours were cut, but our payroll taxes stayed the same. In the income-based plans in the US, payments do not adjust automatically. Instead, they're based on the previous year's income. If a borrower needs to adjust her payment, she's got to fill out an application. The CFPB has shown that this is often a bumpy process that can take months. Borrowers cannot apply by themselves. Their loan services have to move the application along. Meanwhile, the student loan bills keep coming, no matter how small the paycheck is, and millions of borrowers end up in default. Now, some worry that payroll withholding puts student loans above other expenses. Why should a student loan get priority over food and rent? But this is exactly what payroll withholding prevents. In Australia and England, when earnings drop, loan payments disappear immediately, so borrowers can devote those shrunken paychecks to essential needs. This effectively acts as social insurance against shocks to wages and hours. Now, we actually have a system of automatic loan payments right now run by the federal government, but it's brutal. If a borrower goes into default, the Department of Education can collect payments via the Treasury Offset Program. Last year, this program seized $3 billion in federal payments, including tax refunds, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Social Security payments to deceased, disabled, and retired people and their dependents. For Social Security, 15% of the monthly benefit gets lopped off to pay a loan in default. GAO finds garnishments are pushing Social Security recipients below the poverty line. We're already doing automatic withholding of loan payments, but in a way that hurts the most vulnerable people. There are many models for funding college in conclusion. Some advocate for free tuition, others for a system of targeted, need-based aid, no matter what loans are going to be part of our system, whether large or small. Even in tuition-free Sweden, students borrow. We therefore need to make loans and loans repayment work. We need to overhaul a punishing system that turns manageable debt into a financial disaster for millions of student borrowers. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions. Thank you, Dr.