Senate Republicans on Tuesday again blocked a vote on Warren’s student loan proposal. | Rod Lamkey Jr. for POLITICO Warren to 'keep hitting' student loans

Sen. Elizabeth Warren promised this morning to keep pushing for her student loan refinancing bill, but again left it to Republicans to come up with a compromise that can satisfy both parties in the Senate.

“The next step,” she said at a POLITICO event, “is we’re gonna have to keep hitting at this.”


Senate Republicans on Tuesday again blocked a vote on Warren’s student loan proposal, but she and other Democrats have promised to keep fighting for the legislation, calling it a priority for the first 100 days of the next Congress.

At POLITICO’s “Solving For Y: Exploring Opportunities for the Next Generation,” Warren (D-Mass.) and personal finance expert Suze Orman spoke with chief White House correspondent Mike Allen and senior political reporter Maggie Haberman about student loan debt.

( PHOTOS: Solving For Y: Exploring Opportunities for the Next Generation)

Warren reiterated that at $1.2 trillion, the level of student loan debt has exceeded that of credit card debt.

Warren’s bill has secured 58 yes votes, two short of the 60 needed to break the Republican filibuster of the legislation. The cost of the bill would be paid for through a tax on millionaires, a non-starter for Republicans.

“I’m all for tweaking it,” Warren said of the bill, soliciting suggestions from the other side of the aisle. “Come to us with a proposal. We’re willing to talk about it.”

Warren added that colleges – particularly for-profit schools – should be responsible for federal loans when students graduate and can’t get a job. For-profits receive 25 percent of federal aid dollars, she noted, yet are responsible for half of all student loan defaults.

“We should not continue to let this money flow and say the only problem is with the students and with the federal government and the banks,” Warren said. “The colleges also need to have skin in the game.”

Orman defended her decision to teach a financial counseling class at the for-profit University of Phoenix, noting that the course offering included a disclosure that students who could not afford it should not take the class.

Financial institutions are “financially raping – and I say that truthfully – our children,” Orman said.

Asked whether it’s appropriate for politicians to charge large fees for speaking at public universities, an issue that came up recently concerning Hillary Clinton, both Orman and Warren did not directly answer and instead turned to campus debit cards. Many colleges contract with banks to provide such products for their students, and reap financial benefits in return.

“The question is, what the universities are doing,” Warren said. “There’s a lot that goes on in the financial side that is opaque to the rest of the world.”

When the conversation turned to elections, Warren said she wants to see issues affecting people’s “everyday lives” on the 2014 agenda – student loan refinancing, immigration reform, equal pay and minimum wage, to name a few.

Warren said she didn’t want to think about the prospect of Republican taking the Senate and Mitch McConnell becoming majority leader, adding she hopes he is defeated by Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in November.

“I don’t want to go there, for a whole bunch of reasons,” she said. “I’m just gonna be really blunt – I hope he ain’t coming back.”