Thank you, Badgers.

The same Saturday the Badgers shutout the University of Hawaii at Camp Randall, I was proud to host my good friend Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, at the Memorial Union. With the excitement of a Badger game day all across campus, hundreds of students joined us at the Union Theater to talk about how to fix our broken student loan system and pursue debt-free college.

The startling reality is that there’s an economic crisis posed by the nearly $1.2 trillion in student debt that exists in our country. And unlike when I attended UW many years ago (I braved Sellery Hall my freshman year), working part or even full-time won’t prevent you from graduating with five figures of debt.

That’s why we must fight to allow students to graduate from our great public institutions, like UW, debt-free. First, with the encouragement and assistance of the federal government, the state of Wisconsin needs to provide increased support for higher education. There have already been drastic cuts to the UW System — it’s time we find a collaborative way to support our universities, not shame them. We need to increase programs like Pell Grants, and we need to hold all stakeholders accountable for this process: students, parents, universities and both our state and the federal government.

It is also time for some common sense changes to ease the burden for those who already have debt. This should start with allowing graduates to refinance student loans instead of being locked into exorbitant interest rates, just like we do for mortgages.

Simply put, we’ve got to act. As I said Saturday, your parents shouldn’t have to have the salaries of doctors for you to become a doctor, and we must make sure a college degree doesn’t become a path to the American Dream that’s available exclusively to the rich.

Russ Feingold

UW-Madison Class of ’75