[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
[April 24, 1995]
[Pages 579-585]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the American Association of Community Colleges in 
Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 24, 1995

    Thank you very much. Secretary Riley, thank you for your 
introduction. If I were you, I would go bowling. [Laughter] We're going 
to save your job. [Laughter] Thank you, Secretary Reich, for your 
enthusiasm, for being enthusiastic about the right things. In your heart 
alone you have enough domestic content to be the Secretary of Labor. 
Thank you, Jacquelyn Belcher and David Pierce. I also want to say how 
very glad I am to be joined here by the distinguished United States 
Senator from Minnesota, Senator Paul Wellstone, and his wife, Sheila, 
who's here; two of our colleagues in the House of Representatives, 
Congressman Bruce Vento and Congressman Bill Luther, also back there. 
Thank you for being here.
    I want to say a special word of congratulations to the 20 students 
who were named to the 1995

[[Page 580]]

All-USA Academic Team. I want to thank those who are watching us via 
satellite. And I also want to say a special word about some fine 
students and advocates I met just before I came in here. I met two 
students who have benefited from our direct loan program--I'll talk more 
about them in a moment; two students who are critically interested in 
public assistance to education, because without that they would not have 
been able to go to school; and I met a gentleman who is devoting his 
time to organizing people against the attempt in Washington to start 
charging interest on student loans while students are still in college. 
Sandra Tinsley, Jessica Aviles, Jeffrey Lanes, Robbie Dalton-Kirtley, 
who is also one of the academic team all-Americans, and Dave Dahlgren, I 
thank all of them for meeting with me, and they're here somewhere. If 
they are, they ought to wave or stand up--there's Jeffrey. Thank you. 
Thank you very much.
    Before I begin today to talk about education and training, I'd like 
to say just a word or two if I might, before this audience of educators 
and people who believe in and appreciate the value of free speech, about 
where we are in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing and what we are 
going to do about the kind of America our children will inherit.
    Yesterday Hillary and I joined tens of thousands of people in 
Oklahoma City, and of course millions of you all across the country, to 
witness the end result of abject hatred. I was there, as President, to 
represent all of you in the mourning. But also I felt that we were 
there, Hillary and I, as ordinary American citizens as well, as husband 
and wife, as parents, as neighbors of those people.
    No words can do justice to how moving it was to be there yesterday. 
No words can do justice to the courage of those who worked in the rescue 
operation around the clock. And one person has already given her life in 
that endeavor. No words can do justice to the small acts of kindness and 
generosity, all the people in Oklahoma who won't take money at the gas 
station or the local coffee shop or the barber shop or even at the 
airline ticket terminal for people who are there working to try to help 
them put their lives together.
    But I will never forget, more than anything else, the faces and the 
stories of the family members of the victims. I was walking through the 
room shaking hands with them, and I saw a lady with her children who had 
been in the Oval Office just a few weeks ago as her husband left my 
Secret Service detail to go to what seemed to be a less hectic pace of 
duty in Oklahoma City. I saw the children of a man who was a football 
hero at the University of Arkansas when so many people who are now on 
the White House staff were friends of his. The young Air Force sergeant 
took out two pictures his wife had taken f me just 3 weeks ago when I 
visited our troops in Haiti. And she was one of those troops, but she 
came home because we wound down our mission there. And she married her 
fiance, and 3 days later she went to the Federal building to change her 
name. And so he had to give me the pictures his wife took. I saw three 
children, teenage children, with a woman and another child taking care 
of them. One of them had one of my Inaugural buttons on. Their mother 
died last year of an illness. Their father went to our Inaugural, and 
they asked me to sign the pin to their father who is still missing--
three teenagers losing both parents.
     I could go on and on and on. I say to all of you, first we must 
complete the rescue effort and the recovery effort. Of course, we must 
help that community rebuild. We must arrest, convict, and punish the 
people who committed this terrible, terrible deed, but our 
responsibility does not end there.
    In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We 
know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely 
deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say 
things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and 
angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep 
some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and 
upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, 
by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see--I'm 
sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly 
said over the airwaves in America today.
    Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that 
their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in 
this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an 
enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.

[[Page 581]]

    If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, 
the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to 
those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, 
with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of 
speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not 
discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke 
against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.
    If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, 
then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties. When they 
talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, 
we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, 
that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The 
exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more 
unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our 
future, our way of life is at stake. I never want to look into the faces 
of another set of family members like I saw yesterday, and you can help 
to stop it.
    Our democracy has endured a lot over these last 200 years, and we 
are strong enough today to sort out and work through all these angry 
voices. But we owe it to our children to do our part. Billy Graham got a 
standing ovation yesterday when he said, ``The spirit of our Nation will 
not be defeated.'' I can tell by your response that that is true. But 
you must begin today.
    The little girl who read the poem yesterday at our service said, 
``Remember the trust of the children. Darkness will not have its day.'' 
The trust of the children is what we are here to talk about.
    This whole community college movement has made as big a contribution 
to the future of America as any institutional change in the United 
States in decades. All of you live every day with the future. You have 
important work to do. I ask you only to think of how different what you 
do is from what you have been hearing from the voices of division.
    Why do community colleges work? Well, first of all, they're not 
encumbered by old-fashioned bureaucracies. By and large, they are highly 
entrepreneurial. They are highly flexible. They are really democratic--
small ``d''--they're open to everybody, right?--in the best sense. They 
are open to everybody. And people work together. And when something 
doesn't work, they go do something else. That's what you do. You do it 
in a spirit of cooperation. You are remarkably unpolitical in that 
sense.
    In other words, every experience you have--and you see people of all 
ages coming through your doors, walking out your doors, going on to 
better, more fulfilling, more satisfying lives, able to help themselves 
and strengthen America in the process. It is the direct antithesis of 
the kind of paranoia and division and hatred that we hear spewed out at 
us all over this country, day-in and day-out, by people exercising their 
free speech to make the rest of us miserable. And it contradicts the 
experience of what works in America.
    So today that is why I have asked you to do this. I also want to 
talk to you a little bit about what I hope we can do in education. You 
want Americans to be more hopeful, you want this to be a more positive 
place, you want people to be rewarded for their labors--strengthen 
education in America. Build the community colleges; open the doors to 
all. That's the way to build the future of this country, not by dividing 
us and bringing us down but by uniting us, building us up, and pointing 
us toward the future.
    You know, I have seen the faces of America's future. I met a 46-
year-old former welfare mother at San Bernardino Community College, full 
of enthusiasm and hope for the future. I met a 73-year-old Holocaust 
survivor in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, who built a successful business and 
is now committed to investing in the education and training of his 
employees using his local educational institution. I met a 52-year-old 
woman at Galesburg Community College in Illinois, laid off from a 
factory job after 20 years but building a better future.
    Today I met some impressive people. I met this fine young man down 
here, Jeffrey Lanes, who had an injury but didn't let it defeat him. 
Instead, he went back to school with the help of public assistance to 
make a new and better life for himself. But we are better off that he is 
going to have a better life. He is giving us a better America, and we 
thank him for it. And we ought to support opportunities for other people 
just like him.
    I mentioned her before, but when I met Robbie Dalton-Kirtley, who's 
part of the All-USA Academic Team--she's one of these nontraditional 
students. She waited until her young-


[[Page 582]]

est child was in kindergarten, and she went back to school. She's from 
Flat Rock, North Carolina. But she is building a future that will 
strengthen not only Flat Rock, North Carolina, and her family but all 
the rest of us as well. So I thank you for what you are doing. And I ask 
you how we can do more of it, and what should we be doing in Government?
    Well, when I ran for President, I ran with a heavy bias toward 
education. I look out on this crowd today, and I see a lot of people 
from our community colleges in Arkansas. I'm proud of the fact that when 
I was Governor we built more of them, we helped to strengthen the ones 
that were there, we helped some of the vocational schools to either 
convert or merge or to become more like, by diversifying their 
curriculum, the community colleges.
    In fact, I was looking at a couple of people out there; I was at 
their places so often they probably wanted me to leave so they could get 
some work done when I was a Governor. [Laughter]
    I ran for President in large measure because I felt that the work of 
America that was being done out in the grassroots, the work of creating 
opportunity and demanding responsibility and rewarding it, was not being 
done in Washington, that we were increasing our Government's debt at a 
rapid rate and unbelievably reducing our investment in our future.I 
believed then and I believe more strongly now that this country has two 
deficits. We've got a budget deficit, but we've got an education deficit 
as well. And we have to cure them both.
    We are still living with the legacy of the explosive debts of the 
last 12 years. The budget cuts we have made already and the taxes we 
have asked the top one and a half percent of our people to pay--listen 
to this--would balance the budget to today. Today we would have a 
balanced budget except for the interest we owe on the debt run up 
between 1981 and the end of 1992. So we are bringing the deficit down. 
We are committed to that, but we have to remember we have more than one 
deficit.
    You heard the Secretary of Labor talking about this, but I have been 
obsessed since the late 1980's with the increasing inequality in 
America. You know, when I was born at the end of World War II, I grew up 
in the American dream. And the great domestic crisis we had was a civil 
rights crisis. And we thought if we could just get over racial 
prejudice, that our economy was so strong, our society was so powerful, 
that the American dream could just be opened up for everyone.
    And from the end of the Second World War until the late seventies, 
that is pretty much what happened. All income groups increased together. 
And in fact, the poorest 20 percent of our people did slightly better 
than the rest of us in terms of where they started. We were growing 
together and going forward.
    Today, we are going forward. Our economy has produced over 6 million 
new jobs. You heard what the Secretary of Labor said: We had the lowest 
combined rate of unemployment and inflation in 25 years, but we are not 
growing together. And that is why so many Americans say they do not feel 
more secure, even though we're having an economic recovery. They say, 
``Yeah, I read that in the papers, but it's not affecting my life. I 
haven't gotten a raise.''
    Sixty percent of our people are living on the same or lower wages 
than they were making 10 years ago, working a longer work week. Why? 
Because of the combined impact of the global economy, the technology 
revolution, the lack of a Government response to it. In fact, the 
Government response made it worse.
    The minimum wage next year--if we don't raise it this year--the 
minimum wage next year will be at its lowest level in 40 years. That is 
not my idea of how to get to the 21st century. So we have these--
[applause] Thank you.
    So we basically are splitting apart economically. If you look at it, 
it is clear that the fault line is education. Earnings for high school 
dropouts have dropped at a breath-taking rate in the last 15 years. 
Earnings for high school graduates have dropped at a less dramatic rate.
    The only group for which earnings have increased steadily are 
earnings for people who have at least 2 years of post-high school 
education and training. You, you are at the fault line in America. The 
fault line of American society is education. Those who have it are doing 
well. Those who don't are paying. And the future offers more of the same 
at a faster rate.
    Therefore, it is clear that our common mission, if we want to help 
people help themselves and strengthen this country, must be focused on a 
relentless determination to see that every American lives up to the 
fullest of his or her capacities. It is in our common interest.
    So all these wonderful stories you can tell about your community 
colleges, all these touch-


[[Page 583]]

ing individual triumphs, are also the story of America's rebirth at the 
dawn of the 21st century. Make no mistake about it, you are doing more 
than helping individual Americans live out their dreams; you are 
creating the system in which we can keep the American dream alive for 
our country and the American idea alive for all the world in the 21st 
century. If you succeed, we will. You must succeed, and the rest of us 
must make sure we do what we can to help you do it.
    I want to make some brief points today about what we are trying to 
achieve in this Congress and what we are trying to stop from being 
achieved in this Congress. And I want to ask for your help.
    In the last 2 years, we had broad bipartisan support for the most 
substantial increased effort by the National Government to support 
education in a generation: big increases in Head Start; world-class 
standards for our schools and more flexibility for our teachers, our 
parents, our administrations, and our students to meet them; school-to-
work programs so our young people who don't go on to 4-year colleges 
would have the opportunity to move into the workplace with the kind of 
training and skills that would give them jobs that would raise their 
incomes, not drive them down; tech-prep programs as a part of school to 
work. A lot of you are involved in the tech-prep issue, and it's 
something I know a lot about from my personal experience, enabling high 
school students to get work experience and to go straight to community 
colleges. We created AmeriCorps, our national service initiative. And 
more than 30 community colleges and this association are participating 
in AmeriCorps. We've got people doing everything from helping the 
elderly in Kentucky to tutoring kids in inner-city Chicago to helping 
with community policing in Rochester, New York, thanks to the community 
colleges. And I thank you very much for your endeavors.
    Now, what should we do? Number one, do no harm. Don't undo what we 
just did. Number one, do no harm. Number two, yes, we need to reduce the 
deficit, but we should increase the Pell grant program as we have 
proposed, not reduce it, as some have proposed. Yes, we should cut the 
deficit, but one way to cut the deficit that is absolutely wrong is to 
start charging interest on student loans while the students are still in 
school.
    There is an answer, you know, in education to the budget conundrum. 
Almost unbelievably, there is an answer. It is our direct student loan 
program. We want to make it available for anyone who wants to finance 
assistance to college.
    The student loan program, the direct loan program, started when I 
became President because I wanted to find a way to cut the cost of 
college loans, to cut the unbelievable bureaucratic paperwork headache, 
and to give students more options about how to repay loans, because I 
began to see students in our State who were dropping out of college 
because they were terrified that they would never be able to repay their 
loans, especially students who were going to do things that were 
important to our society but didn't pay a lot, students who wanted to be 
teachers, students who wanted to be nurses, students who wanted to be 
police officers, students who wanted to serve the public and knew that 
they would have big loans and modest salaries to repay them with. So we 
began to look around for ways to do this. And we settled on, and the 
Congress adopted, the direct college loan program.
    When I took office, everybody in the country was complaining about 
the way the student loan program worked. Students complained that they 
couldn't get loans or if they did it took them too long and it was an 
absolute nightmare to fool with the paperwork. Colleges complained that 
the paperwork was driving them crazy. And everybody was worried about 
the nature of the repayment terms and the fact that there weren't enough 
options. There was also, I might add, an unconscionable amount of loan 
default, people who would not pay their loans back, costing the 
taxpayers $2.8 billion a year. And the banks didn't have much incentive 
to help, because they had a 90 percent guarantee. So by the time--if 
they brought some sort of action, they'd spend the 10 percent trying to 
collect the rest, so why not just take a check from the Government?
    Well, the direct loan program addresses all those problems. It 
lowers costs for students. It allows borrowers to choose flexible 
repayment arrangements, including a pay-as-you-earn option. Therefore, 
it doesn't doom anyone to a crushing debt burden. It's also, believe it 
or not, helping us to save billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. That 
plus Secretary Riley's more vigilant enforcement of the loan program 
have cut your losses as taxpayers from $2.8 bil-


[[Page 584]]

lion a year to $1 billion a year, a reduction of almost two-thirds.
    But get this--what are we going to do now? In the first year, we had 
104 schools with over 252,000 students in the program. In the second 
year, we'll have more than 1,400 schools, representing 37 percent of all 
loans, committed to enrolling. Today I am proud to announce that in our 
third year, beginning July 1996, 450 new schools will join the program, 
which will mean 45 percent of all student loans will be administered 
through this program.
    Now, that's the good news. You don't have to take my word for it. 
You can look at the students that I just mentioned, Jessica Aviles or 
Sandra Tinsley, they're both here. Go ask them about it. Listen to them 
talk about how much quicker they got the loan and what a joy it was not 
to have to go through the hassle and the delay and the uncertainty.
    But here's the good news. If we keep going until we make the student 
loan program available to all the schools on a voluntary basis, it will 
save the taxpayers $12 billion over 5 years or about the same amount of 
money that would be saved if we started charging interest on student 
loans while the students are in college.
    So if we want to reduce the deficit, let's reduce the deficit by 
increasing education, not by reducing it. That's the message that I want 
you to take out there.
    The second thing I want to say to you is that we have a lot of 
Americans who are unemployed or underemployed who want more training and 
education. And a lot of them now only have access to certain highly 
specified and difficult-to-understand-and-access Government programs. 
There are dozens of Federal training programs, most of them enacted with 
the best of intention by Congress.
    What we propose to do is to put the American people who need 
training in control of their own destiny with these programs, instead of 
just shifting the power from a Federal bureaucracy even to a State one. 
What we propose to do is to consolidate all these training programs and 
create a skill grant, essentially a training voucher to people who are 
unemployed or underemployed or qualified for Federal help, let them get 
the voucher and take it to their local community college and have access 
to the programs you offer for up to 2 years to get the training 
necessary for the future.
    That is a much better expenditure of that money than to continue in 
these programs which may or may not be easily accessible and which 
require a whole lot of paperwork and are very confusing. We want to 
consolidate the money, give it directly to the people who are entitled 
to it in the form of a voucher, and let them take it to you to get the 
education you need. I hope you will help us pass that as well in this 
Congress.
    Finally, let me talk about the tax cut issue. Everybody is for a tax 
cut. Who could be against it? Sounds great. But I would remind you that 
this is a serious issue, this deficit issue. We have worked very hard to 
reduce it by $600 billion. When we brought the deficit down, that's what 
drove interest rates down in 1993. That's what gave us our economic 
recovery. That's what unleashed the engine of American enterprise. And 
the uncertainty that hangs now around whether we continue to show 
discipline in our budget is causing difficulties for our economy.
    We cannot afford a $200 billion tax cut and continue to reduce the 
deficit and meet our responsibilities to education and our future. We 
cannot afford to tilt most of the benefits of the tax cut to upper 
income people. They are doing very well in the economy as it is. They 
are doing very well. And this is not a statement of class warfare. I 
want to create more millionaires. I am proud of the fact that a lot of 
people have become millionaires since I have been President. But what 
will do that is a strong economy, a healthy economy in which everybody 
has the opportunity to succeed. That's what will create more successful 
entrepreneurs. If we have a system that grows the middle class and 
shrinks the under class and keeps this economy strong, the entrepreneurs 
will do well.
    So what we should do is have a much smaller tax cut. It should be 
targeted sharply to people who need it, middle class people. And in my 
judgment it should be targeted to education. People should get a 
deduction for the cost of education after high school, because that will 
raise their incomes over the long run as well as over the short run. 
They will more than pay it back to the Treasury in future years because 
we will be accelerating the number and the intensity and the pace of 
those getting an education in America. That's the kind of tax cut we 
need: less, targeted to middle class, and focused like a laser beam on 
education. We need

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an education tax cut. That's all we need for this country.
    Let me close by asking you once again to make your voice heard in 
another way. The community colleges of America look like America. If you 
go to a board meeting of a community college and hear people talk about 
what programs they're going to have and what projects they're going to 
have and what partnerships they're going to create, chances are a 
hundred to one you can't tell whether there's a Republican or a Democrat 
talking at the board meeting.
    Community colleges are open to people of all races and backgrounds 
and religious faiths and views. They bring people together. They are 
America at its best. We need more of that in Washington. So if you 
believe that we shouldn't start charging interest on the loans, 
especially since there's a better way to reduce the deficit; if you 
believe we should increase the Pell grants, not decrease them; if you 
believe we should keep expanding the direct loan program on a purely 
voluntary basis and see if our program is as good as I think it is and 
people keep using it; if you believe we should have this training 
voucher instead of this complicated welter of Federal programs; if you 
believe it's important to cure the education deficit and the budget 
deficit and therefore we should focus on a tightly targeted education-
related tax cut, then go back home and ask the students and the faculty 
members and the board members to sign petitions that you can send to 
your local Members of Congress and your Senators, without regard to 
party.
    We dare not let education become a political partisan issue in 
America. It was not in the last 2 years; it should not be in 1995 and 
1996. Every American has a vested interest in seeing that we all go 
forward in education. Every single, solitary bit of evidence shows us it 
is the fault line standing between us and a future in which the American 
dream is alive for everyone. If you want to reward hard work in America, 
that work must be smart work. Our future is on the line.
    So I implore you, when you go home, make your voices heard. Say it 
is not a partisan issue, it is not a political issue, it is a question 
of keeping the American dream alive into the 21st century.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 11:46 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the 
Minnesota Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Jacquelyn 
Belcher, chair, and David Pierce, president, American Association of 
Community Colleges.