Noted education advocates from across the country gathered Thursday to announce the launch of a new campaign to target student loan debt and work to lower the cost of college.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the American promise of opportunity and a path to the middle class – through higher education – may be in jeopardy, during an event for the launch of the campaign at the Center for American Progress. Together, more than 60 national organizations joined in the advocacy mission, dubbed "Higher Ed, Not Debt." Warren said in the coming weeks, she and other Democratic colleagues plan to introduce more legislation to address student loan debt and the cost of college.

"You can't reclaim the promise of America if kids don't have a ticket to the middle class," Weingarten said. "And you can't get that ticket to the middle class if it is saddled with a debt that is growing and growing and growing."

Both speakers noted the challenge lies not only in preventing future students from having to take on thousands of dollars in debt to finance a college education – the average debt now standing at $29,400 – but also to help alleviate the burden for thousands of borrowers who are still struggling to repay their student loans. Outstanding student loan debt now totals more than $1.2 trillion.

The campaign will work to promote ways to help current borrowers repaying student loans – such as refinancing and flexible repayment options – to motivate colleges and universities to lower their costs, to bring light to what they say is the increasing role of Wall Street in the privatization of higher education, and to spur elected officials to action.

The cost of college has risen by 300 percent in the last three decades, Warren said, while at the same time more people are taking out student loans to pay for college. In the last 10 years, Warren said, the number of 25-year-olds in America who have student debt has increased by 91 percent.

"These are young people who did everything we asked them to," she said. "They worked hard, they played by the rules ... they tried to get an education, and now the consequence is ... we penalize those young people by saying, 'You're going to pay more for your education than people who have the blessing of being born to a family that can pay for it up front.'"

One of the contributing factors to the high cost of college, Warren said, is a continued disinvestment in state funding for their public higher education systems. Between 2007 and 2012, per student funding in public colleges has decreased by 23 percent, she said.

"What that really means is the states just aren't putting money into the state schools," Warren said. "So where does the money come from? It comes out of the pockets of kids who try to go to those schools."

Warren said the federal government needs to use its leveraging powers to provide a catalyst for reinvestment.

"Think about how we built the national highway system. We put in federal dollars, we asked the state to put in money, and we built a highway system that worked for the whole country that permitted us to move goods all across the country," Warren said. "We need to do the same thing for higher education."

Warren also referenced a bill she is co-sponsoring with Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that would require colleges to have more "skin in the game" by requiring them to meet certain accountability, accessibility and performance measures, otherwise risk having to pay back a portion of students' loans. The money, ideally, would then be redistributed to other institutions that do meet the criteria, she said.

She also said she is working with other legislators to introduce a bill that would allow current students to refinance their undergraduate loans (some can carry rates of up to 5.41 percent) at 3.86 percent. For a recent graduate who has borrowed the maximum amount, Warren said, such a refinance option would lower payments by as much as $1,000 each year, and cut the total interest paid over the life of the loan nearly in half.

"For those who have older loans, for those who have graduate school loans and those with loans from private lenders, the savings would be substantially higher," Warren said. "This is real money back in the pockets of students who invested in their education."

But aside from the tangible factors that have contributed to escalating tuition prices and heaping student loan debt, both Warren and Weingarten said there has been a shift in the mindset of Americans that has resulted in less of a belief of higher education as a public good.

In the same way that the nation in the early 20th century decided public high school was a necessary step in "the path to success in industrial America," Weingarten said, the public must prioritize higher education to give young people a path to the middle class.

Recounting her journey through the public higher education system – from community college to law school – Warren said schools were able to keep the costs so low ($50 per semester for community college and "a few hundred" per semester for law school) because it was "an America that was investing in kids who were trying to get an education."