dr. vedder perhaps with your background, let's start with 100% of our worst and we don't know that 100% of our worst will adopt this and certainly there will be some ratio to that effect but if 100% of borrowers were to refinance their july 1, 2013 loans or a large percentage what kind of impact? do we have any numbers that we can think about here? >> i have not personally done in the estimation of that. however the math suggests the numbers can be very large. we have 40 million borrowers. not all of them prior to 2013 but most of them so you have close to 40 million borrowers borrowing on average 25 or $30,000 so you are talking over chilean dollars. just say for the heck of it you lowered interest rates two to percentage points on a trillion dollars of debt that's $20 billion a year. that's real money. it's probably less than that. i have seen estimate of the deficit measured in the tens of billions of dollars over a long period of time. i think it's a consequential amount of money. >> i think it's an important piece of information that i hope we would have. mr. chopra i wanted to ask yo

dr. vedder. >> thank you senator murray and senator johnson the other members of the budget committee. i wish to make three points. first the current student loan debt crisis would have never happened had college costs increased at the general rate of inflation. the primary cause of the student debt problem has increased university fees. we must deal with the root cause of this mainly runaway college costs of inflation. second there are many reasons for this university price inflation several of which i mentioned in my written statement that one that is relevant here is that rising tuition fees are partially caused the federal assistance finance programs themselves. the programs themselves are part of the problem. any significant successful solution to the problem of writing -- rising college costs will work only if you radically change the nature and magnitude of federal finance. third we are at or near a tipping point where fundamental change will come to higher education. these changes are starting to happen. i believe many policy proposals gaining prominence these days do not funda

dr. vedder raced. it's an issue that i hear from parents and students and -- we're going to get to a point where if the rate of increase of what it costs to get a college education keeps going up at that rate, no matter what we invest, the fed call government, if we're thinking that we're going to be able to help, you know the debt burden of someone like ms. jones, then if it's going up higher than -- you know, i don't know. it may not be going up higher than health care. this is a big issue in terms of how high it's going. how do we get at that issue? and if we're going -- with your investment, how do we get to more accountability for these institutions to actually have to really be market based, think innovatively and deliver quality education at a more reasonable price. because to me, this is a big issue that's just going to hit us all no matter what we do here. >> so i completely agree, the rising college cost is an american tragedy. and we should do everything we can to make sure that those people