Senator Warner kicked off a day of travel through central and southwest Virginia with a stop this morning at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton to chat with students and administrators.

Senator Warner started by talking about the importance of preserving student loans.

"How many of you are on Pell grants?" Senator Warner asked the students. About 15 of 30 students raised their hands. "How many of you have student loans?" Almost all of the students raised their hands.

"Student loans were incredibly important to me," the Senator said. "I was the first person in my family to graduate from college and without loans, I wouldn't have been able to afford it."

Senator Warner also discussed his work on deficit reduction. Mary Baldwin is home to the Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership, the world’s only all-female cadet corps, so students were understandably worried about the effect of mandatory defense cuts.

"We can't have the sequester cuts, especially in a state like ours, but there's going to have to be cutbacks," Senator Warner said. " And if we just kick the can down the road, none of this gets any easier. Every day we fail to act, we add $4 billion to our national debt.