    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [February 14, 1995]
    [Pages 202-209]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the American Council on Education in San Francisco,
    California
    February 14, 1995

        Thank you very much. Thank you, Juliet, and thank you ladies and
    gentlemen. Your welcome was worth the 5-hour plane ride. [Laughter] I
    want to congratulate you all on this meeting, and I want to thank Juliet
    for her leadership and also say to Frank Jenifer, whom I know will carry
    on the Council's outstanding work and strong leadership in higher
    education, I wish you well, and I'm delighted to see you again.
        I want to thank the entire American Council on Education Board of
    Directors for endorsing our middle class bill of rights. It will build
    education and training across America, and I want to say a little more
    about it in a few moments. You will have to play an important role in
    making it a reality, and I know that you'll be interested in what I
    think you have to do, along with what I have to do.
        Let me say at the outset what an honor it is for me to be here with
    my longtime friend, our Secretary of Education, Dick Riley. He has
    really done a wonderful job, and I am very, very proud of him. And he is
    responsible for the fact that we had the most successful year last year
    in promoting advances in education in the Congress in at least 30 years
    in the United States, and I thank him for that.
        I'm also glad to be here for the second straight year and to have
    Juliet's suggestion that maybe I should think about becoming a college
    president when I am once again unemployed. [Laughter] Now, before we
    came out here, she gave a slightly earthier description of why I should
    think about that. She reminded me that President Kennedy, when asked why
    he wanted to be President, said that the pay was pretty good, a nice
    house came along with the job, and you work close to home, and that was
    like a lot of college presidents' jobs. [Laughter]
        Over New Year's I met a college president who told me that we had a
    lot in common with people who run cemeteries. He said, ``You know, if
    you run a cemetery, you've got a whole lot of people under you, but
    nobody's listening.'' [Laughter] On the hard days, when you're about to
    cry, you can think of that and laugh a little bit about it.
        We have more in common than that. You are the keepers of a great
    trust of this Nation, the most diverse network of learning in the entire
    world. It's a spur for our economy and a magnet for our people and for
    people and ideas from all around the globe. I come today as someone who
    spent some of the happiest years of his life teaching in colleges and
    universities, as someone who worked as a Governor tirelessly to advance
    the cause of education, and now in this job, as your partner in a very
    important mission at a very important time in our country's history.
        Our job, yours and mine together, is to redefine the partnership to
    empower our people through education and through training to face the
    demands of this age. That's really why I ran for President. I believe it
    is the responsibility of our generation to work together to preserve the
    American dream for all Americans and to ensure that we move into the
    next century still the strongest country in the world.
        And I think the best way for us to do that is by building a new
    partnership in our country between Americans and their Government and
    between one another. I've called that partnership the New Covenant, more
    opportunity in return for more responsibility and a renewed sense of
    citizenship and community. In that New Covenant, Government's
    responsibility is to expand opportunity while shrinking bureaucracy, to
    empower people to make the most of their own lives, and to enhance our
    security abroad but here at home as well. At the same time, we have to
    demand more responsibility from every citizen in return, more
    responsibility

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    for our country, for our communities, for our families, and for
    ourselves.
        As we end this century, we are facing dramatic changes in our
    economy, our Government, and our daily lives. As we move away from the
    cold war into the information age, we face a world that is both exciting
    and very challenging, a world where knowledge is the basis of wealth,
    creation, and power, and where technology accelerates the pace of
    change. In a world like that, those who have the skills to prosper will
    do far better than any generation of Americans has ever done. But those
    who lack the ability to learn and to adapt may be left behind no matter
    how hard they work.
        That is part of the frustration of America today, that there are so
    many of our fellow Americans who are working harder and harder and
    harder and never feeling that they're rewarded, feeling that they're
    falling further behind, having less time for their children, having less
    time for their spouses, having less time for the things that we know as
    the quality of life, and just plowing ahead. It leads to people having
    too much anxiety and too little hope, and it leads to special
    responsibilities for all of us.
        At the heart of all three of the responsibilities that I said the
    Federal Government has--expanding opportunity, empowering people,
    enhancing security--is your work, education. It is, indeed, the essence
    of the New Covenant. Now more than ever, education and training are the
    keys to opportunity for every American, and the future will only make
    that more true. They will only work, of course, if individuals also
    assume the responsibility for themselves to get themselves educated and
    to impart the value of education to their children, to their families,
    and throughout their communities. But it is clear that the key to
    opening the American dream for all Americans as we move into the next
    century is our ability to broadly spread the benefits of education.
        For more than two decades, I have not budged from this conviction. I
    had, as it turns out for this job, the good fortune of growing up in a
    State which itself was burdened, in America's greatest explosion after
    World War II, for lack of education. And I have worked now for about 20
    years, relentlessly, to constantly change the role of Government so that
    it wastes less money and does fewer things it shouldn't, but so that at
    the same time it serves people better, it insists on accountability, it
    promotes excellence, but it especially emphasizes educating people.
        America now must do that if we have any hope of preserving the
    American dream in terms of all of our people, in terms of an expanding
    middle class instead of one that is shrinking and constantly being
    divided between the haves and have-nots, not in terms of money but in
    terms of education. As a Governor, I invested more in education and in
    higher standards for our students, for our teachers, and for our schools
    and in trying to make it easier for our young people in my State to go
    to college.
        The ``Nation At Risk'' report, back in 1983, confirmed the crying
    need for changes in our public schools, and I was glad to work on trying
    to change the conditions in ours. At the end of the decade, I was proud
    to be one of the Governors who reached out across party lines to work
    with the governors association and with President Bush and his White
    House to craft anew national education goals, goals which we then wrote
    into law in the Goals 2000 program and which we are doing our best to
    help schools all across America to achieve on their own.
        From the first day I became President, we have been committed in
    this administration to reinventing Government in all areas but
    especially in education. Our approach is not--and I repeat, is not--to
    micromanage anything. We have deregulated the Federal Government's role
    in education, in the public schools and elsewhere. We have worked to
    inspire reform at the grassroots level. We have recognized that our job
    is to define a road map, clear standards of excellence, and then to work
    to empower everyone in this society to reach those standards through
    education, to support the educational institutions all across this
    country, to support the students and the families to help them to reach
    those standards of excellence.
        Instead of defending the status quo, we have worked to change it.
    We've abolished 13 of the education programs we inherited. We have cut
    another 38 programs that we thought were less than essential. We have
    consolidated 70 more programs in the budget I have just sent to
    Congress. And all of this is designed to empower students and working
    people, not educational bureaucrats; to help teachers to do their job,
    not to help the Federal Government to regulate more.
        Others have talked about such things, but our administration has
    actually cut over a quarter

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    of a trillion dollars in Federal spending. We have reduced more than 300
    domestic programs. We have eliminated more than 100,000 people from the
    Federal payroll, and we have used the savings from the payroll reduction
    to put 100,000 more police officers on our streets in community policing
    settings, not run by the Federal Government but people who work at the
    grassroots level on the problems they confront every day. We are on our
    way, if no other law passes, to cutting more than a quarter of a million
    people from the Federal payroll and putting all those resources back
    into making our communities more secure.
        And the budget I have just sent to Congress proposes another $144
    billion in spending cuts. But my strategy is eliminating yesterday's
    Government to meet the demands of today and tomorrow, to give us a
    leaner but not a meaner Government, to cut Government to reduce the
    deficit and to increase our investments in the future, in education, in
    technology, in research, things like Head Start and Goals 2000 and the
    defense conversion programs we supported and the medical research
    programs we supported. These things make us stronger as a people. They
    build opportunity, and they demand responsibility, and they are good for
    America.
        We should be discriminating in this work we are doing. We should
    move beyond rhetoric to reality. Let others talk about cutting spending.
    We have done it, and we'd like some more help. But we have to realize
    why we're doing it. We're doing it to lift the country up and bring the
    country together and move the country forward, not to find some way to
    divide us in a new and different way so we have more rhetoric, more hot
    air, and less progress. Let that be our commitment: to do better.
        Now, I admit that some in the new Republican Congress see education
    in another way. They think education at the national level is just
    another area to cut and gut. Their proposals will cut investments in our
    future and increase the cost of student loans to our neediest students
    to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. They will limit the availability of
    lower cost direct loans to middle class students to increase profits for
    the middlemen in the student loans, even though that means a higher
    deficit. Indeed, the only thing they have proposed spending more money
    in education on are funds going to middlemen by limiting the amount of
    the direct loan program, by cutting it off just as it's becoming more
    and more successful. And some of them don't want to reinvent the
    Department of Education as I have done to make it stronger and leaner
    and more effective. They want to abolish it altogether. Well, I think
    Dick Riley's worth the money. And so, I want you to know that to all of
    this, I will say no. I will fight these proposals every step of the way.
    And I want you to join me in fighting them, too.
        The fight for education is the fight for the American dream. It is
    the fight for America's middle class. It is the fight for the 21st
    century. It should therefore--and I emphasize--it should therefore be a
    bipartisan fight. When we passed the elementary and secondary education
    act last year, drastically reducing regulation, emphasizing more help to
    poor children in need, giving teachers and school principals more
    flexibility, it had bipartisan support.
        Look, I want to work with this new Republican Congress to help
    America. We support many of the same initiatives. I supported them when
    they passed the bill to apply to Congress all the laws they put on
    private employers. I have supported our common efforts to reduce the
    burden of unfunded mandates on State and local governments. I have
    supported giving more flexibility to the States in pursuing welfare
    reform and health care reform. I've supported the line-item veto. But we
    clearly have our differences.
        Look at the student loan reforms. We eliminated the middlemen and
    got the funds directly to the schools and the borrowers which meant,
    unbelievably, lower fees, lower interest rates, easier repayment choices
    for students. It meant less paperwork, less redtape, less bureaucracy to
    administer the programs for colleges and universities, and it meant
    much, much lower costs to the taxpayers.
        Our proposal, when fully implemented, will save the taxpayers $12
    billion over a 6-year period, while lowering the cost of college loans
    to the student and reducing the hassles to you. That is reinventing
    Government at its best. That is the new Democrat approach. It ought to
    be the new Republican approach, but instead they want to cap these
    loans. I want to expand them. I want to include all the schools and all
    the students who want to be a part of this program by 1997. Your choice,
    but I'll be darned if I want to cut it off from you when I know that it
    will help you.

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        They want to pay for the tax cuts in their contract for America by
    eliminating the student loan subsidy so that we start charging interest
    on the loans to our poorest students while they're in college. That
    costs $2 billion a year. That adds 20 percent on the average to the cost
    of going to college for some of our neediest students to pay for tax
    cuts. It is not right. That would be the biggest cut in student
    financial aid in the history of the United States.
        Our approach is to help students and their hard-working parents, to
    cut bureaucracy, to reduce the deficit by not subsidizing noncompetitive
    middlemen. I might add that those who wish to compete for student loans
    are now doing it in many places for lower cost than they were providing
    when the Government was giving them a lock-down guarantee, because of
    the competition from the direct loan program.
        Now, that is our approach. The other approach would increase the
    cost of education, would keep the bureaucracy and the redtape, and would
    increase the deficit by guaranteeing billions and billions more in no-
    risk funds to middlemen in the student loan system. It is wrong. It is
    wrong. And we should not stand for it. And I hope you won't stand for
    it. I hope you'll stand up and fight for it.
        Now, as you well know--and I want to emphasize--we are not talking
    about a give-away. This Department of Education has gotten tougher on
    enforcing laws against default. And the default rate has dropped by one-
    third. The net annual cost to the taxpayers has fallen by almost two-
    thirds since we have been in office, from $2.8 billion to $1 billion,
    because we're enforcing the laws against default. I think it is wrong to
    default on your student loan. This Department of Education has gotten
    tough with scam operators masquerading as higher education. And every
    one of you wanted us to do that. Now, with this progress, I hope we can
    continue to remove the regulatory burdens from many of the strong
    institutions with proven records of responsibility. That's what you want
    us to do. That's his valentine present to you.
        But that's the way we ought to be doing this. Secretary Riley will
    work with you to find a better way of balancing the flexibility you want
    with our obligations to the taxpayers. But the point is, other people
    talk about this stuff, but when I showed up in town 2 years ago, I found
    a student loan program that was too costly, helping too few people, gave
    too few options to the borrowers with a redtape headache to you, and the
    taxpayers were being ripped off. And we've tried to change it.
        Now, when we proposed these direct student loans, our opponents and
    those who wanted to protect the status quo said that the Federal
    Government was completely incapable of administering a loan program.
    Well, they weren't right. They were wrong.
        I got a letter that was sent to Terry Hartle by Jerome Supple, the
    president of Southwest Texas State in San Marcos. It's a big school now.
    It has 21,000 students. It distributes grants and loans in excess of $23
    million. President Supple wrote about what direct lending has meant to
    his school. He also wrote to me, but Dick Riley gave me this copy of his
    letter to Terry Hartle, and I like it better than what the speechwriters
    put in, so I'm going to write what he actually said. [Laughter]
        This is what he said: ``We are aware of the concern of some members
    of the financial community about the shift to direct lending and can
    understand the concern for a loss of revenue. However, the savings to
    the Government and the improved service to other students offered by
    direct lending are of greater importance. The other argument that the
    Federal Government cannot effectively administer such a program and must
    rely on the expertise of the private sector is counter to our
    experience.''
        Listen to this: ``The results have more than met our expectations.
    We have gone from an institution that was scrambling to meet our
    students' need, often after classes have started, to an institution that
    was one of the first in the State to get awards out last fall, so early,
    in fact, that it had a positive effect on our admissions program.
        ``While the direct lending program must share some of the credit for
    the improvement of our financial aid services with our hard-working and
    talented staff''--there's a good politician--[laughter]--also true--
    ``there is no doubt that direct lending allows us to serve our students
    better. And finally,'' he says, ``it is legitimate to express concern
    about the ability of the Department of Education to manage the direct
    lending program at full capacity, but the experience to date suggests
    that it can do this very well. It is rare that the Federal Government
    creates a program that both saves money and improves service to its
    constituents.''

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        Listen to what the students say. I got a letter from Marie Lyons, a
    40-year-old student--rather more typical these days. She wrote to me to
    say that she had given up hope on going to college. But with our loan
    reforms, she's been able to go to Murray State University in Kentucky,
    studying criminal justice. She'll be the first person in her family to
    graduate from college.
        You know, we can't take hope away from people like Marie Lyons and
    all the other people now that are flooding back into your institutions,
    into the community colleges, into the 4-year institutions, because they
    know--they're way ahead of the politicians--they know what they need to
    do to make good lives for themselves, and they're coming to you. They're
    coming to you in record numbers. But people like that deserve the best
    opportunity we can give them. They are very responsible. They are
    working hard. They are people from all races and income groups and
    backgrounds with a million different life stories, but they are chasing
    a common dream. Because of people like that, we should not abolish the
    Department of Education, either. We should not do that.
        You know, everybody talks about this being the information age. The
    White House and now the House of Representatives are in this little
    friendly contest to see who can do the most high-techy stuff on
    Internet, and call us on the computer and see what we have to offer,
    read the administration's budget. But if this is true, if the new
    economy really is based more than ever before on knowledge and skills,
    we have to do more of education. And undercutting education at this
    time, saying that this is not a national concern, that would be like
    undercutting the Department of Defense during the cold war. We won the
    cold war because we stayed strong. And we will win the fight for our own
    future and a place in the 21st century if we stay strong with education.
    That is what we should do.
        You know our future depends upon it. You know, as President, as has
    already been said, I've worked pretty hard for us to do well in this new
    war for the minds and hearts of our people and for the future. And I do
    think one of the smartest things I ever did was to appoint Dick Riley as
    the Secretary of Education. One of the reasons is, I find that once you
    become President, sometimes people, even people you think know you very
    well, all of a sudden don't really tell you what's on their minds. It
    drives me nuts since I don't mind hearing what's on people's minds.
    Sometimes they don't want to hear what's on mine in return when they
    tell me, but it's okay. [Laughter] But one of the things you need to
    know about the Secretary of Education is, we've been friends since I was
    barely old enough to shave. He always tells me what's on his mind--
    [laughter]--and what's on his mind is you and your students and the
    future of this country.
        So I'll say again, we're cutting inessential education programs.
    We've saved more money by going to the direct student loans than they
    can save by cutting out the people who work at the Department of
    Education. Who are we trying to kid here? He is worth the investment;
    the other people who work there are worth the investment.
        We are not running education, but we are trying to energize it and
    create opportunity and shine a light to the future. This is a classic
    battle, and we ought to fight it and win it together, not just the
    battle to save the Department of Education, not just the battle for the
    direct loan program, not just the battle against increasing the cost of
    student loans but the larger issue. And I will say again, this ought to
    be a bipartisan battle that we fight so that we can meet our
    responsibility to prepare our children for the 21st century and so that
    we can make the most of our own lives.
        For 2 years, we have done everything we could do to prepare our
    people for the new economy. Last year when I came before you, I
    presented a comprehensive agenda for lifelong learning. I'm proud to
    report that with the last Congress, we did produce a tremendously
    successful record in achieving that agenda. We reformed Head Start and
    expanded it by 30,000 more children. And next year, I want to expand it
    again by at least that many. That's why we're cutting inessential
    programs, not only to reduce the deficit but to put the money where the
    people need it. I think the taxpayers want the Head Start program
    expanded.
        We passed the Goals 2000 program, and for the first time we spell
    out a national understanding of what our young people must learn to
    compete in the world. This goes right to the heart of the whole approach
    of the national role in education, not trying to tell people how to
    teach or regulate how they spend every day and every hour or control
    them through a bliz-

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    zard of paperwork but to set national standards and then give State and
    local governments the control, the power, the opportunity, and, where we
    can, the resources to get the job done, to give them the flexibility
    through waivers of complex Federal rules and reforms like charter
    schools and public school choice, and to do it with no new Federal
    regulations to diminish State and local control. I'm proud of that.
        The way we're running that program is the way the Federal Government
    ought to relate to the States in the area of public education. We are
    raising the bar for everyone. All of our young people are going to have
    to do better. I think we all know that. All of our parents and
    grandparents are going to have to help our young people to do better.
    All of you in this room now accept as a truism that we have the best
    higher education system in the world, but that we have to do better in
    our school systems K-12, and we are all going to have to teach to higher
    standards, to work to higher standards, to learn to higher standards.
        Our communities, our businesses, they're going to have to pitch in
    and do more. And our young people, we know--and let me say this with all
    sincerity and convictions--we know that too many of them are still
    trying to learn in atmospheres that are too dominated by violence and
    drugs. If they can't walk down the halls or learn in the classrooms
    because they're afraid for their safety, then all the reforms will not
    be successful. That's why making our school environment safe and
    disciplined and drug-free are important to all the other standards being
    achieved, and why we have worked so hard in this administration and in
    this Department of Education to make sure that all of our legislative
    efforts included the safe schools initiatives.
        You know, some young people--I ought to emphasize, too, because I
    know who all is out here--don't plan to go on to 4-year colleges. And
    that's fine. If they don't plan to do that, we also have to make sure
    that they have the academic strength and skills they need to compete.
        That's what our School-to-Work Opportunities Act was all about, to
    reinvent the relationship of high school to the world of work and the
    work of post-high-school education with high standards that enable our
    students to learn in class and to begin to reach out into the real
    world. Along with their classroom learnings, they are learning real
    jobs, dealing with real people, and we expect them to go on for some
    post-high-school education as well.
        We're not doing this with a big national bureaucracy. We're doing it
    with grants and advice and help and support to let every State set up a
    flexible network, working with employers and schools and the
    postsecondary educational institutions to make sure that we fill this
    enormous gap in the American system. There are too many of our young
    people still who neither get a 4-year college degree or at least have a
    good school-to-work transition the way many of our competitors do.
        These reforms, every one of them, will make sure that more capable
    students are coming into your institutions, which means you'll have to
    spend less time bringing them up to speed. I know that would be a relief
    to all of you. A lot of us have been working on it for years and years,
    but I believe it will make a difference.
        Something else we did last year that I'm very proud of that two or
    three of you have already mentioned to me today is our national service
    program, AmeriCorps. It already has 20,000 Americans taking
    responsibility for improving their country at the grassroots level and
    earning some money to go to school. It is a very, very important thing
    for this country, and I am very proud of it.
        Americans like the 16 members at the University of California at
    Berkeley, who have 750 of their classmates tutoring middle school
    students and helping four local police departments set up neighborhood
    watch programs. Now, that's just one example of hundreds I could give
    you of what a modest Federal investment can do to get a big result.
    Eighty-nine members of AmeriCorps in Texas immunized--listen to this--
    104,000 infants in Texas two summers ago. In Simpson County, Kentucky,
    AmeriCorps members are teaching second-graders to read, and they've
    already raised the reading levels there from 2 years behind the official
    standard to 1 year ahead of it.
        Now again, some people in the new Republican Congress say that
    AmeriCorps is a waste of money, bribing people to do service, an
    expensive way to send people to college. I say it's about the best thing
    that's happened to this country in a long time. I'm going to fight to
    keep it, and I hope you'll fight for that, too. And for all of you that
    have had AmeriCorps projects on your campuses and with your stu-

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    dents, I thank you, and I hope more of you will ask to do it.
        We've got a lot more work to do. We have to protect the Pell grants,
    and as Juliet said, my budget raises the maximum grant by 12 percent. We
    all know the Pell grant program got in trouble, and we had to make it
    solvent again, and it hasn't kept up with the economy. But this is a
    good step in the right direction.
        We've got to preserve the work-study program, the other campus-based
    programs that we all know are important to the students on your
    campuses. And we've got to keep moving forward on university-based
    research with expanded investments and less redtape. I do not believe
    that it is the right thing to do to take universities out of the
    partnerships we now see forming. In defense conversion, for example,
    where we are doing remarkable things with the decline of the defense
    budget, taking some of that decline and putting it into partnerships
    between universities and private companies with some Federal investment
    and a whole lot of private investment. Again, there are some in the new
    Congress who say, let's get rid of all that. That's our competitive
    edge, research, development, mind work, making connections, moving
    forward.
        All of this is an agenda that works. In his state of American
    education address earlier this month, to which Secretary Riley alluded,
    he said that America is turning the corner from being a nation at risk
    in education to being a nation on the move. Well, you've got my word: I
    will fight for the education and training reforms that will keep us on
    the move. And I want you to fight for them, too, and we will win because
    the American people are for us.
        Now, that's why I have proposed this middle class bill of rights,
    because I want to emphasize what we still have to do. We can't just
    preserve what we've got. We've got to keep going forward. All over this
    country there are people who are saying, ``Well, I read about this
    recovery, and I know we've got 6 million new jobs, but it's not
    affecting me. I still feel insecure and uncertain, and I haven't gotten
    a raise. The middle class bill of rights, I think should be called the
    bill of rights and responsibilities because, like all the other things
    we've been talking about today, you can't take advantage of it unless
    you act responsibly. It does offer a tax cut for people, but only if
    they're behaving responsibly, raising their children, educating
    themselves or their children.
        From your point of view, the most important parts of it are a tax
    deduction for the cost of education after high school; an IRA that you
    can withdraw from tax-free for education and for other purposes like
    buying a health insurance policy; and the collapse of 70 of the
    Government's training programs into a program which a person who's
    eligible for Federal training help because he or she is unemployed or
    working for a very low wage can draw on and just take the money, up to
    $2,600 a year, to an institution of his or her choice, getting around
    the Federal bureaucracy, getting around all the programs and going
    direct to a lot of you.
        Now, this is a good thing, and I thank you for endorsing it. But I
    need your help to make it happen. Why is it a good thing? It's a good
    thing, first of all, because it will lower the cost of living for hard-
    working people who have gotten no benefit out of this recovery yet. But
    instead of just giving them a quick fix, it lowers their cost of living
    because it increases their standard of living over the long run by
    putting the money into education. It is the right way to give tax relief
    to the middle class. It is consistent with long-term control of the
    deficit. It is consistent with a commitment to long-term economic
    growth. And I ask each of you to do what you do best now--to help teach
    people about this, to talk about it; because this resolution is really
    nice, but what we really need is for every Member of Congress to hear
    from every college president, every dean of students, every member of
    every board of trustees, every student body president, every student
    organization in the country, ``Hey, don't take the interest subsidy
    away.'' ``Hey, don't stop us from getting the direct loans.'' ``Hey,
    pass the middle class bill of rights.''
        Education is the key to our future. It ought not to be a partisan
    issue. If there is one thing in the wide world that ought to unite us on
    the way to the next century, it should be our common commitment to
    explode the potential of our people. I need your help. I want your help.
    You can do it. But the resolution has to be a first step, not the last
    step. Be heard in every office of every Member of Congress in the United
    States, and we will have a great victory. I need you. I want you to do
    it. I'm confident you will.
        Thank you very much.

    [[Page 209]]

    Note: The President spoke at 11:45 a.m. in the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero
    Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Juliet Garcia, chair, Franklyn
    Jenifer, incoming chair, and Terry Hartle, vice president for government
    relations, American Council on Education.