The moment when Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Education told a panel of senators that some elementary schools may need guns to protect students from grizzly bears was the shot heard round the world, if you will, from Betsy DeVos’s confirmation hearing Tuesday. But other exchanges provided more meaningful — if still vague — clues as to how she would approach higher education and student debt, if confirmed.

Much of the hearing focused on DeVos’s well-established record of support for allowing students to use public dollars at institutions other than traditional public schools and on her family’s vast wealth and the potential conflicts of interest it may create. But for many of DeVos’s critics, the hearing showcased how the education reformer who has never held public office might be unfit for the job of overseeing the nation’s student-loan system.

Perhaps the most revealing exchange about DeVos’s higher-education bona fides came between the nominee and Sen. Al Franken, who disputed Devos’s claim that student debt has grown 980% in the last eight years. “That’s just not so,” he said. Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, is correct. Between the third quarter of 2008 and the third quarter of 2016, outstanding student debt grew from about $659 billion to nearly $1.4 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. That’s a jump of more than 100%, but still nowhere near the 980% figure cited by DeVos.

Key Words:So long, gun-free school zones? Blame it on bears — as Betsy DeVos did

A spokeswoman for the Trump transition team wrote that the 1000% figure was a reference to the growing cost of college over the past 30 years, not the growth in student debt. DeVos first referenced the 1000% figure in an exchange with Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), saying “The issue of student debt and the amount of student debt — over $1.3 trillion right now up, almost 1000% in the last eight years — that’s a very serious issue.” And she appeared to stand by the notion during the later exchange with Franken. When asked by the Senator whether she said student debt had increased by 1000%, Devos responded, “980% in the last eight years.”

Some of Franken’s Democratic colleagues took issue with DeVos’s stance on a number of their higher-education priorities. In a tense exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts who previously raised concerns in a letter to DeVos about what she described as the nominee’s “seemingly nonexistent record on higher education,” the senator drew attention to DeVos’s lack of personal experience with the student-loan system — neither she nor her children used student loans to attend college, she told the Senate panel during the hearing.

She then asked whether DeVos planned to enforce a relatively new rule championed by the Obama administration — known as gainful employment — that sanctions career training programs where students have particularly high debt-to-income ratios. Hundreds of programs, the bulk at for-profit colleges, serving hundreds of thousands of students are at risk of not meeting the government’s standards, which require that graduates spend no more than 20% of their discretionary income or 8% of their annual pay, repaying student loans, the Department of Education announced earlier this month.

“ ‘Swindlers and crooks are out there doing back flips when they hear an answer like this.’ ” — Elizabeth Warren

DeVos didn’t commit to enforce the new rules, telling the senator that she would “review” them. “Swindlers and crooks are out there doing back flips when they hear an answer like this,” Warren responded. “If confirmed, you will be the cop on the beat, and, if you can’t commit to use the tools that are already available to you in the Department of Education, I don’t see how you can be the secretary of education.”

The gainful-employment regulations are controversial — the for-profit college industry waged a court battle against them — so DeVos’s wavering isn’t necessarily surprising. She also refused to endorse making tuition- or debt-free college available to students, a Democratic policy priority during the election. When pressed on the topic by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who championed tuition-free college during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination, DeVos described free tuition as an “interesting idea,” arguing that “nothing in life is truly free.”

“You’re right — somebody will pay for it, and that takes us to another issue,” Sanders, the Vermont independent, responded. “Right now we have proposals in front of us to substantially lower tax breaks for billionaires in this country while at the same time low-income kids can’t afford to go to college. Do you think that makes sense?”