    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [February 7, 1996]
    [Pages 178-184]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Association of Independent Colleges and
    Universities
    February 7, 1996

        Thank you very much. I assure you, when I was attempting to help
    Anne's institution get that foundation grant, I had not imagined that
    one day I would reap this benefit of that fine introduction. [Laughter]
        Let me congratulate Mike Adams on his successful term as chairman
    and for his kind remarks and for recognizing the brilliant work of our
    Education Secretary, Dick Riley. I know of no person who has had that
    job who has done as much in so many areas to have a positive impact on
    the education of the American people. And we are all in his debt, most
    of all the President, but all of us are in his debt for the fine job he
    has done.
        And I do want to thank Anne Die again for that wonderful
    introduction and for the kind remarks she had about Hillary and about me
    and what we did together. I must say, as I said in the State of the
    Union Address, after 3 years the central lesson that I have learned as
    President is that in meeting our challenges we have to do what we did
    instinctively at home; we have to work together more. And the role of
    Government should be seen in the context of an instrument of helping us
    work together to meet our common challenges. I enjoyed doing that then,
    and when it's possible, I like doing it here. [Laughter]
        I'm also delighted to see David Warren again. We first met, as he
    may have said publicly before, in 1970, about 26 years ago, when we both
    worked on the Senate campaign of Joseph Duffey in Connecticut. And
    neither one of us had any gray hair then. [Laughter] Now Joe Duffey is
    doing a fabulous job for the United States as head of the USIA, and he
    has less gray hair than either one of us. [Laughter] Our only
    consolation is he also has less hair than either one of us. [Laughter]
    Anyway, it's been a busy 26 years for both of us, and I'm proud of the
    work that he does for you.
        For 20 years this association has given voice to the concerns of
    higher education. You have demonstrated something that America knows
    about itself but sometimes forgets, and that is that there is strength
    in diversity. You come from every corner of our Nation. You represent
    every field, from the sciences to the liberal arts to businesses and all
    kinds of institutions, from church-related schools to historically black
    colleges to women's colleges. You have shown enormous strength and
    perseverance in our common efforts to keep the doors of college
    education open to all Americans.
        Your Alliance to Save Student Aid is doing wonderful work, and I may
    be preaching to the choir, but every now and then even the choir needs
    to hear that. It is doing wonderful work. I know how hard you have
    fought to save the right to choose the direct lending program. And I
    tell you what I have told the Members of Congress: This is no time, for
    whatever reason, under whatever circumstances, to cut back on any kind
    of student aid. We need more of it, not less of it.

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        If I might, I would like to take just a few moments today to try to
    put the struggles that you and I are engaged in, to not only keep open
    the doors of college for all Americans but to widen those doors, in a
    larger historic context. In my State of the Union Address I said I
    thought that America had entered a great age of possibility, and I
    believe that. I believe that the American people who are poised to take
    advantage of it will have more opportunities to live out their dreams
    than any generation of Americans ever has. We also know, perplexingly,
    that this is an age of great challenge in which huge numbers of
    Americans feel deeply frustrated and worried that not only they, but
    their children, will not have the chance to live out their dreams.
        How could both these things coexist at the same time? How could
    there be so much good economic news and so much troubling economic news?
    How could there be good news on the social front and troubling news on
    the social front? It is, I am convinced, endemic to the nature of this
    moment in our history, which I believe is most like what happened to us
    more or less a hundred years ago when we went through the transformation
    from being a rural and agricultural society into a more urbanized, more
    industrial society. And now we're moving into an age dominated by
    information and technology and the markets of the global village.
        The nature of work has changed, and that helps you in your
    enterprise because we now have--almost all work contains more mind and
    less body, more information and more technology, and is changing more
    rapidly so you not only need to know more, you need to be able to learn
    more. The nature of work is changing, and there is no sign that the rate
    of change and the direction of change will do anything but speed up.
        The nature of work organizations are also changing. You have more
    and more people who are self-employed, more and more people who can now
    work at home because there are computer hookups. The largest and most
    bureaucratic and most top-down organizations tend to be swimming down,
    pushing decisions down, and getting rid of a lot of people in the middle
    of the organizations that used to hand orders and information up and
    down the food chain of the enterprise. And again, that can be good, but
    it can be severely disruptive if you're 50 years old and you've got
    three kids to send to college and you've just been told that your
    Fortune 500 company doesn't need you anymore.
        We see the change in the nature of work. The encouraging thing is
    that in the last 3 years, more jobs have been created by businesses
    owned by women alone than have been eliminated by the Fortune 500
    companies. But they're different. They're smaller; they're more
    scattered about. They are less secure in a traditional sense. So work is
    changing and work organizations are changing.
        And finally, the nature of our markets are changing. The markets for
    financing and the markets for goods and services are increasingly
    global, increasingly rapid, and on occasion, ruthless because of their
    ability to seek the area of greatest opportunity in a split second. And
    all of these things have opened up vast new opportunities but impose
    great new challenges on our ability to maintain old-fashioned values and
    to maintain a sense of national community as all these changes
    proliferate and put pressures on all of our institutions to pull apart
    and break down and leave people feeling more isolated.
        You see, for example, in the United States right now in the last 3
    years, we have enjoyed the lowest unemployment and inflation rates
    combined in 27 years. We have about 8 million new jobs. Homeownership is
    at a 15-year high. Exports are at an all-time high. As the Congress
    debates the farm bill today, we see soybeans at a 17-year high, wheat at
    a 15-year high, and corn is about $3.60--and I don't know how long it's
    been since it's been that high but a while--partly because of technology
    in agriculture and the sophistication of the markets by which
    agriculture is traded and moved around the world. We have in each of the
    last 3 years had the largest number of new businesses formed in our
    history, each year breaking a record, and the largest number of new
    self-made millionaires in our history, not people who inherited their
    wealth but people who lived the American dream, who went out by their
    own efforts and put something together in the private sector and made
    themselves a million dollars doing it. And that is all very encouraging.
    And, of course, you have enjoyed it because knowledge is at a greater
    premium than ever before, and it's exciting for you.
        Now, the other side of that is, more than half the people in the
    workplace are working

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    in real terms for the same or lower wages they were making more than a
    decade ago. The average working family is spending more hours on the job
    today than they were in 1969. That's very important. And as more and
    more people work for smaller and smaller units in more and more shifting
    patterns, and there's more and more downsizing, over and over and over
    again, more people feel insecurity about not only their job but their
    health care, their retirement, and their ability to educate their own
    children.
        I went to the typical little red brick schoolhouse when I was in
    grade school in my hometown in Arkansas with a man who grew up in very
    humble circumstances, who was the first person in his family to go to
    college, who was an engineer with a Fortune 500 company. And when he was
    49 the company came to him and two other 49-year-old white male
    engineers and said, ``We don't need you anymore,'' right when all their
    kids were ready to go to college, and the company was making more
    profits. And for 9 months he worked to try to find another position.
        This story has a happy ending. He got another one; he's doing all
    right. And he had a lot of high-tech help. He had a sophisticated
    computer program where he had identified 250 contacts all across America
    of any possible employers who could hire someone like him, making about
    what he had made, doing about what he had done. And he churned that
    network with all of its high-tech glory for 8 or 9 hours a day, but it
    still took him 9 months to find a job. That is the other side of this.
        The other day I had coffee with a friend of mine from out West who
    is an immensely successful man who by pure, blind irony was also in that
    little red brick schoolhouse with me 40 years ago in Arkansas, along
    with his brother. His brother was also immensely successful, but he
    happened to work for two companies in a row that were bought out in one
    of these leveraged buyouts, and in the downsizing he lost his job. He
    didn't do anything wrong; he was perfectly productive. But he just was
    in the wrong place at the wrong time, not once but twice.
        So our big question here is how can we keep the dynamism of this new
    economy, how can we keep it going and growing and offering these
    opportunities but make the opportunities available to all Americans and
    give us a chance to preserve a sense of community in this country, that
    anybody who works hard and plays by the rules should have a chance to be
    rewarded for it?
        You see the same thing on the social front where the American people
    really are beginning to get their act together, not only in terms of
    their values but in terms of adopting strategies that work. You see the
    crime rate down, the welfare rolls, the food stamp rolls down, the
    poverty rolls down, the teen pregnancy rate down for the last 2 years.
    That's the good news. The bad news is I could tell you the crime rate
    was down, and I could show you the statistics, and there is still a
    zillion streets in this country you wouldn't feel comfortable walking in
    after dark.
        So all those problems are still far too great for a great country
    like ours to tolerate. And we are wasting too many of our children's
    lives and too much of our fortune dealing with the fallout of our
    inability to organize ourselves in constructive ways so that we raise
    our children properly and we all behave right. And we are paying a
    terrible price for it.
        We're not putting all of our players on the field. We still have
    whole chunks of areas of our cities and isolated rural areas which have
    been completely untouched by this economic recovery, but they have
    plenty of the dark side of our social fallout.
        So the challenge, I will say again, is how can we make the American
    dream available to all Americans and how can we pull this country
    together when there are so many forces working to divide it? I believe
    the first thing we have to do is to get beyond the partisan bickering
    here and pass the 7-year balanced budget plan that protects education
    and the environment and Medicare and Medicaid. We have identified now,
    in common, common to both the Republican and Democratic approaches, $700
    billion in savings. That is more than enough to pass a balanced budget
    plan in 7 years that meets the criteria I've laid out. There is no
    excuse for not doing it. We ought to just do it and put it behind us and
    stop having the newspapers filled with it every day. We ought to give
    the American people a balanced budget.
        Then, as I said in the State of the Union--so then what? The
    question is, how are we going to meet these challenges? How are we going
    to help people to make the most of their own lives? How are we going to
    help families and communities to solve their problems at the

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    grassroots level? I am convinced that we have to do it together. And I
    am convinced there are seven major things we have to do, and I will just
    repeat them briefly and then focus on education.
        First and foremost, we have to enable ourselves, our friends, and
    our neighbors to do a better job raising our children and strengthening
    our families. Sometimes the time young people are old enough to go to
    college, it's already too late for too many of them.
        And let me just mention one example. Today a comprehensive
    scientific study is being released on the impact of television violence
    on young people. And it concludes what we all know in our instinctive
    selves, that television violence is pervasive, numbing, and can have a
    lasting and corrosive effect on young people if they're exposed to too
    much of it for too long. It distorts their perspective and later changes
    their attitudes and, for some of them, their behavior.
        In my State of the Union Address, I called upon Congress to pass the
    telecommunications legislation, but to pass it with the V-chip
    requirement in it so that all the new cable television sets would give
    parents the right to select out programs with excessive violence or
    other objectionable content they didn't want their children to see. I am
    proud to say that tomorrow, at the Library of Congress, I will sign the
    telecommunications bill into law with the V-chip requirement in it. And
    I think it will make a difference.
        It's an example of what we ought to do, though. The
    telecommunications part of this legislation, because of the changes
    there, would enable our country to generate tens of thousands of more
    high-wage, high-tech, exciting jobs, to offer consumers vast new
    opportunities in telecommunications. But we can do it in a way that
    still reinforces instead of undermines our basic values, that doesn't
    say anything goes, whatever looks like a market opportunity in this
    millisecond should govern and overcome whatever your enduring sense of
    values is. But that's what I like about it. And that's the sort of thing
    I think we need to be looking for in other areas of our lives.
        Our second challenge, obviously, is to try to provide an educational
    opportunity for every American for a lifetime.
        Third: to provide a new sense of economic security in a dynamic
    economy by giving people access to education for a lifetime, access to
    health care, and access to a pension you can take with you when you move
    from job to job.
        Our fourth challenge is to continue the fight against crime and
    gangs and drugs until we meet what we all know instinctively is the real
    test. The real test is when all of us feel that crime is the exception,
    rather than the rule, we'll be back to where we ought to be in America
    again, and we can't stop fighting until that is how we all feel.
        Fifth, we have a serious challenge still, as we see from all the
    weather we've endured just in the last few years, to deal with the
    fundamental and pervasive impacts of environmental degradation and to
    change the whole mindset in America away from the idea that you have to
    accept a certain amount of environmental despoilation to grow the
    economy to the idea that you can actually reinforce economic growth if
    you have the right kind of environmental protection policies. And unless
    we make a commitment as a Nation to do that, we and the rest of the
    world are going to pay a terrible, terrible price.
        I told the Prime Minister of China--I mean, the President of China,
    when we were in our last meeting that the biggest threat to our security
    from China had nothing to do with what everybody reads in the paper all
    the time; it had to do with the fact that they might get as rich as we
    are, and they'd have the same percentage of their people as we do
    driving automobiles, and we haven't figured out how to deal with the
    greenhouse gases and the global warning, in which case they would
    present a real threat to our security because we wouldn't be able to
    breathe, since they have 1 billion, 200 million people and we only have
    260 million. This is a very serious thing. And it needs to be a
    bipartisan or nonpartisan issue.
        The sixth great challenge is to maintain our leadership for peace
    and freedom. This is a time when a lot of Americans think we can afford
    to be isolationist because we have so many challenges at home. We paid a
    terrible price to win the cold war, and who is at our borders now?
    That's a very simple, but wrong, attitude. If we want people to buy our
    goods and services, we have to be willing to cooperate with them to
    advance peace and freedom. If we want countries to cooperate with us in
    stopping drugs from coming into our country, we have to work with them
    to get that done. And you'd only

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    have to think about a few examples, the World Trade Center and the sarin
    gas breaking open in Japan, killing all those people in the subway, to
    know that high-tech terrorism is a global phenomenon that can only be
    engaged if you are involved with other countries.
        Finally, we have to change the way our Government works so it
    inspires more confidence, does more good, and can still meet the demands
    of the modern era.
        Now, having said that, if you ask me which one of these things is
    most likely to meet my objective, which is to help people make the most
    of their own lives and to give people the tools to solve their problems
    together, you would have to say that creating a system of excellent
    education with access to everybody for a lifetime is the most likely
    thing to do that, because the more educated people you have, the more
    they're likely to see these connections that I'm talking about and to
    make the right decisions community by community, State by State, and in
    our Nation as a whole. And unless we do that, we're going to be in real
    trouble.
        But if we do it, then the age of possibility will be for everyone,
    and the 21st century will probably be known as the American century too.
    That's why higher education is so important. That's why I have worked so
    hard to protect these student aid programs, and indeed, to advance a lot
    of what we are doing.
        You know these statistics, but I think a couple of them are worth
    repeating. In 1979 a worker with a college education earned about 40
    percent more than a worker with a high school degree. Today the gap is
    about 75 percent and rising.
        When I studied the 1990 census figures, I noticed that the only
    group of younger people that had incomes that were rising were those
    that had at least 2 years of post-high school education, as a group.
    Those with under 2 years or less had declining incomes from the
    beginning of their experience in the work force. They had committed
    themselves to a treadmill from the beginning which would get harder and
    harder and harder to stay on.
        So I say, you know that. Now, if we all know that, why in the world
    would we ever do anything to make it harder to go on to college or to
    stay in college or to discourage people from taking out college loans?
    This is not rocket science. I may be talking to a lot of college
    presidents, but this is simple. This is a, b, c. This is first grade,
    second grade, third grade. Why would we do anything ever to make it
    harder to go on to college and to stay there?
        On this issue we must all stand firm, and I know I can depend upon
    you to do it. This is not a question of what the Government does. The
    Federal student loan guarantee program, the Pell grant scholarships, all
    these things are--these are not big Government programs. These are
    programs designed to help individuals make the most of their own lives
    and to help you succeed in operating your institutions. That is the role
    of the National Government.
        And this is not soft-headed. We have--I'm proud of the fact that
    since we've been here Secretary Riley and I have overseen almost a 50
    percent reduction in the student loan default rate. I'm proud of that,
    and I know a lot of you support that.
        It would seem to me that that would be evidence that we know also
    what we're doing when we say we ought to make more loan options
    available to more people. I like the direct loan program because it's
    less hassle for you and less hassle for the students. But I really like
    it because as long as you even have the option to do it, it'll be more
    pressure on all the competition to cut the costs and increase the
    quality of service. And I've seen that happen as well.
        We've increased the Pell grants, and we should do that some more. We
    still haven't gotten back to where they used to be; we ought to do it
    some more.
        This year 25,000 young people will earn some money to go to college
    by their AmeriCorps service in communities all across the country, and
    we ought to maintain that program. I feel strongly about it.
        And I'm sure you remember that in the State of the Union I proposed
    three further steps. First of all, that we should award a $1,000
    scholarship to every student in the top 5 percent of every graduating
    class in America; that's 128,000 graduating seniors we could give a
    little more money to go to college on. I think we ought to do it.
        Second, one thing that I think that we have not done as good a job
    as we should have in the last 3 years--and we're trying to catch up in a
    big way--the Secretary of Education and I want to expand the work-study
    program so that by the year 2000, one million American students will be
    working their way through college with work-study.

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        And thirdly, and most important of all, we believe that families
    with incomes of under $100,000 should be able to deduct as much as
    $10,000 in post-secondary education costs from their taxes, including
    tuition and fees at any eligible institution, university, or college,
    private or public, or vocational school. That would benefit 16\1/2\
    million Americans, the best kind of tax cut we could have.
        We give tax relief for businesses that invest in new plants and
    equipment. If we know we're running on brainpower, why shouldn't we give
    tax relief to families that invest in education? We ought to do that.
        I know that all of you agree with all this. I also know that all of
    you are trying to come to grips with your part of this equation, which
    is to do whatever you can to hold down college costs. I was reviewing in
    my own mind. Being the father of a high school junior, I have to learn
    to think about this now. One of you will have a chance to make me much
    poorer before long, perhaps. [Laughter]
        But I got to thinking about it. When I went to college, I had a job
    and a scholarship. And then I went to law school. I had a scholarship, a
    loan, and, in 3 years, six different jobs. And I enjoyed it all. I not
    only didn't mind working, I was grateful to have a chance to have the
    jobs, and I enjoyed being able to support myself, and I was proud when I
    was able to pay off the last of my loans.
        But we know that from that time, when I was in school--nearly 30
    years ago now when I finished--to this time, the cost of college as a
    percentage of a family's income has increased dramatically, that more
    and more people need more college aid. And I sometimes wonder whether
    colleges don't get more and more behind by raising tuition costs because
    you have to keep recycling it in scholarships and loans. They're about
    double what they were 10 years ago, and of course, as I said, the most
    significant thing is that the college costs have gone up so much more
    than middle class incomes have and much, much more than lower middle
    class incomes have, which--and that's evidenced in the fact that in the
    last 5 years you see a decline in enrollments among a lot of people in
    the bottom 20 percent of the income group in America, the very group
    that used to live the American dream with the greatest pride, so that
    you've got increasing enrollments as you go up the income scale, which
    is good, but decreasing enrollment as you go down the income scale,
    which is bad. We will do what we can to keep up with the scholarships
    and loans, but anything that can be done to ratchet down the burdens on
    deserving students is a good thing to do.
        I noticed that Muskingum College in Oklahoma--I mean in Ohio--
    actually lowered its tuition by $4,000. And these notes I have say that
    North Carolina Wesleyan cut its tuition by 23 percent. I don't know
    whether they did it by containing costs or praying to God or both.
    [Laughter] But I think it is a good thing to do wherever possible.
        Again, I say to you, we cannot do what we ought to do for America if
    we increase college enrollment overall, but children who would be
    disproportionately minority children, but not all, in the bottom 20
    percent--or the bottom 30 percent of our income families, are seeing
    their enrollments decline. Drake University in Des Moines is holding its
    increase to the rate of inflation. I know that others are giving
    discounts to certain people. The University of Rio Grande is giving free
    tuition to high school valedictorians and salutatorians. This kind of
    innovation and leadership is something I think ought to be encouraged.
    But I would ask you all to think especially about those kids that are
    coming out of homes from the bottom 20 percent who are afraid that they
    can't make it.
        The main reason I wanted the direct loan program has nothing to do
    with all the stuff that I just talked about about it. I wanted it
    because I thought that every person ought to have the option to borrow
    money for college and pay it back as a percentage of their income so
    that if they came from a poor family or if they decided to do jobs that
    were public service jobs, for example, if they decided to be police
    officers or schoolteachers or do something else where they would never
    get rich, they would know that there would never be a single, solitary
    year when they would be in need because of the payment schedule of their
    college loans. And I think that's important.
        But I say to you again, anything you can do to try to bring down the
    college burden, especially on that group of our young people, so that
    all income groups increase their enrollment again is something that we
    could do together that would make a real difference for America.
        The last point I want to make is this: A lot of you have AmeriCorps
    projects on your campuses. A lot of you who don't have that have

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    some sort of community service project. I think it is very important
    that the young people of this country have the opportunity to serve
    while they're in college in some meaningful community service. I think
    it is very important that when they leave their colleges and
    universities, they have the idea that they have an obligation to give
    something back to their country and they understand that the only way we
    ever get anything done in America is to bridge our differences and work
    together and to learn by doing in that way.
        So I would urge you all to do everything you can to increase the
    involvement of your students in community service projects. We can
    change the character of America by changing the attitudes, the approach,
    the intuitive responses of this young generation, this brilliant,
    aggressive, intelligent, and energetic group of people toward the idea
    of community.
        I see all these surveys that talk about how pessimistic or cynical
    people are, but the truth is, cynicism is an excuse for inaction and an
    awful poor one. It's a poor rationalization for believing that nothing
    you do makes any difference. And so I ask you all to remember that. You
    have these people--even though the age of college students is getting
    increasingly higher, none of us are too old to give a little something
    back and to be given an opportunity to give something to our community.
    And you can do that in a unique way that opens up the way people think
    about America and its future.
        I believe--I will say again--I believe that the younger generation
    today will live in a time of greatest possibility America has ever
    known. But in order to make it really work, those possibilities have to
    be available to all Americans who are willing to work for them. And they
    have to be available in a country that is coming together across its
    divisions, not drifting apart.
        The changing nature of work, the changing nature of work
    organizations, the changing nature of markets are all putting pressures
    to divide, to split up, to splinter off an American community that still
    needs very much to move closer together, to open opportunity to
    everybody, to tackle our social problems, and to make this country what
    it ought to be.
        There are no people in America better positioned to lead this
    country in the right direction than you are. Thank you for your fight
    for higher education, thank you for your fight for student aid. Please,
    please, take on these other challenges, and let's give this country the
    kind of future it deserves.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:28 p.m. in the Ticonderoga Room at the
    Hyatt Regency Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Anne Die, vice
    chair, and Michael Adams, chair, board of directors, and David Warren,
    president, National Association of Independent Colleges and
    Universities; and President Jiang Zemin of China.