    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [September 3, 1993]
    [Pages 1432-1436]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Opportunity Skyway School-to-Work Program in Georgetown,
    Delaware
    September 3, 1993

        Thank you. I want to say how delighted I am to be back in Delaware.
    You know, when I saw Governor Carper here I was reminded of the time
    back during the election when Senator Biden and I had a big rally in
    Wilmington. And I was pleased to say that I was delighted to be in a
    place where it was not a disadvantage to be the Governor of a small
    chicken-growing State.
        I am delighted to be here today. I can tell all of you are happy,
    too. How could you not be when you see students like Chrissy and Francis
    making those presentations? Weren't you proud of them? They were great.
    Let's give them another hand. [Applause]
        I also want to thank Governor Carper and my former colleague and
    longtime friend, now your Congressman, Mike Castle, and Senator Biden--
    without whom I don't think I could function as President--all of them
    for being here today. He is not responsible for the mistakes I make,
    only for the things that go right. [Laughter]
        I want to thank all your State officials for coming here today and
    many of the local officials and all of you from the various groups. I
    want to say a special word of thanks to the two persons who also spoke
    on the program, Dorothy Shields from the AFL-CIO and my longtime friend
    Larry Perlman who came from a long way away. He lives in Minnesota, and
    he thought enough of this project to come here to represent the American
    business community. This is the sort of partnership that I want us to
    have in America. I'd like to say, too, how much I appreciate the work
    that has been done

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    by this education program, and to Diane and to all the others who are
    here, Carlton Spitzer and others, I thank you for the work you have
    done.
        I came here today not just to showcase these fine students but to
    make the point that every student in America needs the opportunity to be
    in a program like this. I got into the race for President because I was
    very concerned about the direction of my country, a direction that had
    been underway for 20 years under the leadership of people in both
    parties in Washington with forces that are beyond the reach of ordinary
    political solutions. In 1973, real hourly wages for most working people
    peaked in this country, if you adjust them for inflation. For 20 years,
    most Americans had been working a longer work week for the same or lower
    wages, once you adjust them for inflation, while they've paid more for
    health care, housing, and education.
        We have tried a number of things to deal with this issue, to deal
    with the whole question of how do you keep alive the American dream; how
    do you offer each generation of young people a better future than their
    parents had. It is clear to me that we have to revive our economy, all
    right, and we also have to pull our people back together. And the two
    things are inseparable. We need to offer our people more opportunity,
    insist that they assume more responsibility. We need to all be reminded
    that we are in this together. We have to recreate the American
    community. That's why when you see here business and labor and
    government, when you see young people of different racial and ethnic
    groups, when you see people reaching across their party lines, you
    really see the future of America--if it's going to be a good future.
        I picked the two Cabinet members who are here with me today because
    I thought they could help us to create that future. The Secretary of
    Labor, Bob Reich, has been a friend of mine for 25 years and I think has
    written more thoughtfully than any other person I know about the future
    of the American work force and what's happening to us in this global
    economy. The Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, has been my friend for
    about 15 years now, was my colleague and one of the best Governors I
    ever served with on the issues of education and economic development. In
    other words, one of them is at the Labor Department, the other is at the
    Education Department, but they both understand that if you want a good
    economic future, there can be no simple division between work and
    learning. We must do both.
        In the last several months and in the months ahead, you will see a
    lot of publicity about other initiatives of our administration: the
    economic plan that reduced the deficit, increased incentives to invest,
    offered 90 percent of our small businesses a chance to reduce their tax
    burden but only if they reinvest in their businesses and gave tax relief
    to 20 percent of the working poor families in the State of Delaware; the
    reinventing Government program that the Vice President will announce
    next week that will help us to virtually revolutionize a lot of the
    things about the Federal Government to eliminate waste and inefficiency
    and give all of you better value for your tax dollar; the health program
    that the First Lady has worked on so hard for several months now, which
    will finally give every American family the security of knowing they
    won't lose their health care if they lose their jobs or someone in their
    family is born with a serious medical condition and will give the
    American business community the assurance that we're not going to
    bankrupt the country and wreck the economy by continuing to spend more
    and more and more for the same health care.
        I will ask the Congress to approve, with the amendments that we
    secured, the trade agreement between the United States and Canada and
    Mexico because I believe it will create more jobs. And we'll have a
    vigorous debate about that, but I will tell you this: The real problem
    we've got right now in America in creating more jobs is rooted at least
    in part in the fact that our exports are not selling abroad because we
    have too many trade barriers in the world and slow economic growth
    everywhere. Latin America is the second fastest growing part of the
    world. They can buy more of our things, and they should.
        And finally, Senator Biden and I are going to work on a new crime
    bill that will put more police officers on the street and take more guns
    out of the hands of our children.
        All of these are critical to restoring opportunity, insisting on
    more responsibility from our people, and giving America the sense that
    we are one community again. But none of them will work unless we
    maintain a steadfast determination to educate and train our people at

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    world-class standards. We are living in a world where what you earn is a
    function of what you can learn; where the average 18-year-old will
    change jobs seven times in a lifetime; where there can no longer be a
    division between what is practical and what is academic. Indeed, one of
    the young students back there said, ``I'm learning a lot more than I
    used to because this is fun.'' Now, that sounds funny, and a lot of you
    clapped when Chrissy talked before, but the truth is there's a lot of
    very serious academic research which indicates that significant numbers
    of our people actually learn better in practical circumstances than they
    do in classroom settings. It's different for different people.
        For two centuries our education system has always been adequate to
    the task and has helped us to keep alive the American dream--an awful
    lot of people here today who wouldn't be doing what you're doing if you
    hadn't had the opportunity to get a good education. But on the eve of
    this new century, when we are struggling so hard to get and keep good
    jobs; when we are struggling hard to reestablish the premise that people
    that work harder and are more productive should earn more money year-in
    and year-out; a world of instant communication, supersonic
    transportation, worldwide technologies in global markets, and a
    veritable explosion of knowledge and invention, we have to face the fact
    that we, while we still have the best system of higher education in the
    world, are the only advanced country without a system to guarantee that
    every student that doesn't go on to a 4-year college institution has the
    opportunity to be in this program or one like it that we're celebrating
    here today. We don't do that.
        So what happens? We see these young people talk and we see these
    young people demonstrate their skills, and our hearts are filled with
    joy, and we're proud, and we know they're going to have a decent future.
    What we don't see here today is that 50 percent of the high school
    graduates in this country do not go on to college, 75 percent of the
    high school graduates in this country don't finish college, and nowhere
    near all of them are in programs like this which should start when they
    are in high school. That is what this is all about today.
        During the 15-year period from 1975 to 1989, the wages of young high
    school graduates, that is, young people who are under 25 who had only a
    high school diploma, dropped about 40 percent in real terms. The wages
    of young high school dropouts, that is, people who are working full-
    time, dropped even more. Why? Because of the downward pressure on those
    wages caused by global competition, caused by mechanization, caused by
    all the pressures that you all know. But young people who got at least 2
    years of post-high school training related to a workplace skill for
    which there is a demand in this global economy were overwhelmingly more
    likely to get good jobs with rising incomes.
        And when you look at the American economy, when you see the
    unemployment rate or you see the income statistics, you know that
    they're grossly oversimplified. If the unemployment rate is 6.8 percent,
    what it really means is that the unemployment rate among people over 40
    with college educations is about 3.5 percent, which is almost zero.
    You've got almost that many people walking around at any given time. But
    the unemployment rate among young people who drop out of high school may
    be 20 percent. And if they happen to live in a place where there's
    already high unemployment, it may be 40 or 50 percent.
        This issue that we're meeting here about today may never acquire a
    great deal of public attention because we're not fighting about it. The
    bill that I introduced shortly before the Congress left has Republican
    as well as Democratic cosponsors. There are labor as well as business
    people up here. We are not having the old fights, but the old fights
    have not provided the new solutions that America desperately needs. And
    that is what we are here today to seek.
        Change is going to happen in this country. No President can promise
    to shield the American people from the changes going on. And anybody
    that tries to is simply not being candid. The real question is whether
    change is going to be the friend of these young people and the rest of
    us or our enemy. And that depends on whether we can adapt to change.
        This program today is an example of what America has to do to adapt
    to change. We can no longer afford to be the only advanced nation in the
    world without a system for providing this kind of training and education
    to everybody who doesn't go on and get a 4-year college degree. We can
    do better. We can have programs like this everywhere. And that's what
    our legislation is designed to do.
        This legislation basically will support learning in the workplace,
    learning in the schoolroom,

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    and connections between the workplace and the schoolroom. It will
    involve all kinds of programs that are working. It is not a big Federal
    top-down program, but we will have some common standards: a certificate
    that means something when you finish a program, meaningful learning in
    the workplace and in the schoolroom, a real connection between work and
    school, and a real chance to get a job. And when combined with the other
    major piece of education legislation that we have in the Congress, the
    Goals 2000 program, which seeks to enshrine in the law the national
    education goals that the Governors adopted along with the previous
    administration of President Bush back in 1989, that legislation will
    establish for the first time a national system of skill standards so
    that you will actually know whether you're learning what you're supposed
    to learn by national standards and whether they stack up with the global
    competition. That is what we seek to achieve, not with a new Federal
    bureaucracy but by building on successes like this.
        This bill involves a historic partnership, too, between the
    Departments of Education and Labor. They will sort of operate like
    venture capitalists. They will provide seed money to States, set the
    goals and the standards, give waivers to communities to give them more
    flexibility as they set up new programs, and require that the graduates
    attain real skill certificates that verify the quality of their
    training. But the design and planning of the programs will be left to
    States and communities and educational institutions who know best how to
    address the local possibilities. Finally, the school-to-work legislation
    will enable our Nation for the first time to create the kind of
    partnership that we so desperately need between schools, businesses,
    labor, and communities, so that we can connect our people to the real
    world. That's why the Business Roundtable, the National Association of
    Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National
    Alliance of Business, the AFL-CIO, and leading Republican and Democratic
    legislators all support this legislation.
        If we are going to prosper in the world toward which we are heading,
    we have to reach out to every one of our young people who want a job and
    don't have the training to get it. We don't have a person to waste. And
    believe you me, when we waste them, the rest of us pay. We pay in
    unemployment. We pay in welfare. We pay in jail costs. We pay in drug
    costs.
        And when we make education come alive, as it has for these young
    people who showed me their plane, when we enable students to apply
    English, history, and science to the practical problems of the
    workplace, we are building a future that all of us will be a part of. We
    must--I will say it again--we must learn to integrate serious academic
    study into the workplace, starting in high school and continuing for at
    least 2 years thereafter, for everyone who needs it. If we do it, if we
    do it, we are going to do as much as anything else we could do to
    guarantee most Americans a real shot at a good future. And if we don't,
    all of our other, all of our other economic initiatives will be
    consigned to less than full success.
        I got into this issue when I was a Governor of a State not unlike
    Delaware and I saw too many people working their fingers to the bone for
    less and less and less, too many people who were dying to go to work who
    could never find a job, too many people who didn't have impressive
    academic accomplishments but were plenty smart enough to learn anything
    they needed to know to compete and win in this global economy. I
    determined then as a Governor that if I ever had a chance to do
    something about this in this country, I would. And that's what we're
    here doing today.
        I want you to support this legislation just like you support
    Opportunity Skyway. I want you to support the idea that the public and
    private sectors all over America can do for all of our young people who
    need it what this program has done for the young people we've heard from
    today: provide a smooth transition from school to work. So far, 900 high
    school students have participated in Opportunity Skyway. Many of them
    are en route to careers in aircraft maintenance, avionics, and airline
    piloting. Now they'll find out how much algebra and geography they've
    learned. And I'll say this, I'm on my way back to Washington now using a
    flight plan that the students prepared. Three or four hours from now, if
    I'm wandering out over the Atlantic somewhere--[laughter]--I'll know I
    wasn't very persuasive today.
        There are programs like this one all over the country; we're going
    to build onto them. But we need your help. Next week when the Congress
    comes back, I hope each one of you will do what you can to encourage the
    United States Congress, without regard to party, to embrace this new
    approach to a new economy to give

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    these young people a new future and give America a better future. We can
    make a real difference, folks, a real difference if we'll pass this
    legislation and get about providing every young people the opportunity
    to be as self-assured, as knowledgeable, as skilled as the two young
    people you heard from today. That's an important legacy we ought to
    leave to them.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:47 a.m. in the Delmarva Aircraft Hangar
    at Sussex County Airport. In his remarks, he referred to Opportunity
    Skyway participants Chrissy Thomas and Francis Orphe; Larry Perlman,
    chairman and CEO of Ceridian Corp. and chairman of the Business
    Roundtable working group on workforce training and development; and
    Carlton Spitzer, director, Opportunity Skyway.