    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [July 10, 1996]
    [Pages 1109-1113]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte
    July 10, 1996

        Thank you. Didn't she do a good job? Let's give her another hand.
    Tracy was great. [Applause] Thank you.
        I'd like to thank Dr. Zeiss for hosting me here and for all the work
    that he does to give so many people an opportunity. I want to thank my
    good friend Congressman Mel Watt for the representation that he gives to
    you and for the service that he gives to our Nation.
        I thank Harvey Gantt, who's been my friend for a very long time, for
    joining me here today and for his commitment to the education of all
    Americans and the opportunity for all the citizens of the great State of
    North Carolina.
        I want to thank all of you for making me feel welcome. I was greeted
    when I came here by Brian Johnson, the president of your student body,
    and I got to learn a little bit about the

    [[Page 1110]]

    students who are here and this fine institution. I thank the mayor and
    the other local officials who are here and the educational officials
    from the State of North Carolina.
        I am glad to be back in Charlotte. This is a little different
    experience. The last time I was here I got to do something Presidents
    don't get to do; I got to go to the Charlotte speedway and drive my own
    car, because there was a Mustang owners convention, and I am one. So I
    had a great time.
        Today I want to talk about what puts all of you who are students
    here in the driver's seat for America's future. I think that this
    institution--and many people have talked about my abiding love affair
    with community colleges--but just look around you. Listen to Tracy's
    story. To me, the community college is the institution in America which
    most clearly reflects how we ought to be organized, how we ought to work
    together, and what we ought to be trying to do as we move this country
    into the 21st century.
        You think about it. Compared to a lot of educational institutions,
    it's not very bureaucratic. It's flexible. The curriculum changes all
    the time, based upon the needs of the people and the changes in the
    economy. It's also a highly democratic--that's small ``d''--institution.
    [Laughter] It's open to everyone. It also embodies the values that I
    think this country needs to work on as we move to the future. Everybody
    can have an opportunity. They can't seize it unless they're responsible
    enough to take control of their own lives, just like Tracy did. And
    there's a real sense of community here.
        You go to any community college in America--and I've been to some in
    which there was as many as 70 or 80 different ethnic groups represented
    in a single community college--and the sense of community comes out of
    people's shared values and reaches across their racial, their ethnic,
    and their religious differences, so that people are stronger by working
    together than they are by emphasizing their division.
        That's what this whole country needs to do. This country would work
    better if it worked more like a giant community college. Indeed, one of
    the things that Vice President Gore and I have tried so hard to do is to
    make our Federal Government less bureaucratic, less rule-oriented, more
    goal-oriented, to give people opportunities but not guarantees, and to
    give you a better service at a lower cost. I would be remiss, since I'm
    here in Charlotte, if I didn't say that the best example of that may
    have been created by a native of Charlotte, Erskine Bowles, who is here
    with me today, who ran the Small Business Administration.
        When I became President, somebody who wanted help from the Small
    Business Administration, no matter how little their business was, had to
    fill out a form that was an inch thick, and it took weeks to get an
    answer. Under Mr. Bowles' leadership we cut the form to a page; we cut
    the waiting time to a matter of a couple days; we cut the budget of the
    SBA and we doubled the loan volume of the SBA; and we increased the
    diversity of the loan volume, including more women and more minorities,
    and never lowered the standards for anybody. We just did it the way
    community colleges do it, giving everybody an opportunity in a
    nonbureaucratic, efficient, effective way.
        I want to ask all of you just for a few minutes today to think about
    where we are in the history of this great country. We just celebrated
    our 220th birthday. We're 4 years away from a new century that begins a
    new millennium. We're going through a period of rapid change in our
    economy and the way we work, the very nature of the workplace. It's
    affecting how we live and how we raise our children and how we organize
    our families and communities.
        And we have also gone through a great change in the way we relate to
    the rest of the world in terms of our opportunities and our crises. We
    have more economic opportunity than ever before because of the global
    economy. But because of the global economy, people who don't have the
    kind of educational opportunities that are offered here at the community
    college are likely to get left behind and not have a chance at those
    opportunities.
        We don't have to worry about nuclear war as much as we once did. And
    I'm proud to say that for the first time since the atomic bomb was
    dropped 50 years ago, there's not a single nuclear weapon pointed at the
    children of the United States of America. I'm proud of that.
        But as we learned in the heartbreaking loss of our men in uniform in
    Saudi Arabia, when the Federal building blew up in Oklahoma City, when
    we thwarted the plans that were laid in Arizona a few days ago for
    terrorism, we have new security threats that are the direct result of
    having more open borders, more easy access to information, a higher
    technology world. And

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    what I want you to think about is, how are we going to make the most of
    the future? How are we going to meet our challenges and preserve our
    values? How are we going to reward work and family?
        I believe more than I can say that America has a mission to get to
    the 21st century with the American dream alive for every person who's
    willing to work for it, with the American community coming together, not
    being more divided, bridging the gaps of race and religion and ethnicity
    and gender and region and even the incomes you start out with in life to
    find common cause the way you do here. And finally, maintaining the
    leadership of this country for peace and freedom and prosperity
    throughout the world. And I think the only way to do that is to reassert
    a basic bargain: opportunity in return for responsibility from all
    citizens and a strong sense of community in which every single person
    has a citizen's responsibility to make not only your families but your
    neighborhoods, your communities, and your country a stronger, more
    united place. That is how we will make the most of our future.
        Our job in Washington is to give you the chance to make the most of
    your own lives, not to guarantee results. When I became President we had
    a drifting economy, an exploding deficit, the slowest job growth since
    the Great Depression. I asked the Congress to adopt a plan to reduce the
    deficit, to dramatically expand trade, to give tax relief to the
    hardest-pressed working families, to--even while we were cutting
    spending--invest more in education, in research, in technology, in
    environmental protection, in ways that would grow the economy.
        I said I believe this will help our economy. I think it will cut the
    deficit in half and create 8 million new jobs. Well, 3\1/2\ years later,
    we know the results. Our deficit is going to be cut by more than half,
    and our people have now produced 10 million new jobs in 3\1/2\ years,
    320,000 of them plus in North Carolina.
        There was a mention about the minimum wage a minute ago. There has
    always been a debate about the minimum wage. Some people say if you
    raise it, it will cost jobs. Ninety percent of the studies say that if
    you raise it in a modest manner to keep up with inflation, it does not
    cost jobs.
        Our economy--I just got back from a meeting of the great seven
    industrial powers of the world in France. Together, all of them together
    in 3\1/2\ years, have produced 10\1/2\ million jobs, a half a million in
    the other six countries and 10 million in America. We can afford to
    raise the minimum wage and give people a decent standard of living.
        Last week I met a woman who was a student in a program like many you
    have here, in Chicago, at a festival there in which all the different
    eating establishments from all the different ethnic groups came out to
    the great Grant Park, overlooking Lake Michigan in Chicago. And I was
    going from booth to booth sampling the food. It was a hard job, but I
    had to do it. [Laughter] It's one of those things you just have to do
    when you're President. [Laughter]
        But this young woman was--she said, ``Mr. President, I appreciate
    the fact that you're trying to raise that minimum wage. I hear them
    talking about how the only people who make the minimum wage are
    teenagers who live at home in middle class families.'' She said, ``I'm a
    28-year-old single mother of two. I work full time for the minimum wage,
    and I go to college at night, and I need it.''
        I saw on television a few months ago a woman interviewed down in
    Virginia who worked in a factory. And they said to this lady--she was in
    her fifties--they said, ``Well, they say you might lose your job if we
    raise the minimum wage.'' And she looked at the interviewer, and she
    said, ``Honey, I'll take my chances.'' [Laughter]
        So I say to you we've got to bring the benefits of this economy to
    everybody. But the real answer to doing that is to focus on creating the
    opportunity for people to continually improve themselves. And that's
    where education comes in. We all know that education has always been
    important for individuals. Today it's more important for individuals
    than ever before, and it is critical to the future of this country. We
    have to be able to move people into the work force with the skills they
    need and the ability they need to learn new skills throughout a
    lifetime. That is what I came here to say to you today.
        And I have said to people for a long, long time now, it has been
    apparent at least--and I say, at least--6 years, since we saw the 1990
    census, why there's increasing inequality in America, why, even when we
    grow jobs, inequality seems to increase. It's because too many people in
    the adult work force in the United States did not get a chance to go to
    a commu-

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    nity college like this one and get skills that would give them a good
    job with a prospect of a growing income. That is a clear and
    overwhelming reason.
        And so we have worked hard, not just to increase Head Start and to
    help schools lift their standards in K through 12, but to increase
    access to higher education. In our first 3\1/2\ years we redid the
    student loan program so that people could borrow the money in a way that
    was faster and less costly and young people borrowing money and schools
    that participate in our direct loan program could have at least four
    different options about how to repay the loans, including limiting your
    repayment to a certain percentage of your income so no one would ever be
    discouraged from borrowing money for fear that they would be bankrupt in
    trying to pay it back. We increased the Pell grant program which I bet
    is popular. And I might say, I'm trying to increase it again. We passed
    AmeriCorps, as your president said, the national service program. And
    already 45,000 Americans have had a chance to earn some money to go to
    college by working in their community to help people solve problems at
    the grassroots level.
        But I want to say to you that I do not believe that's enough. I
    don't think it's enough. I think we have to do more to raise the quality
    and the opportunities in the public school years. And the Vice President
    and I have made a personal commitment to see that every classroom and
    every library in every school in America is hooked up to the Internet by
    the end of this decade so that all children, no matter how poor they
    are, no matter whether they're in rural or urban districts, can access
    the same information that young people in the wealthiest school
    districts in America can. I believe in that.
        But I also know that we have to find a way to get more adults to
    come back to community colleges and get skills so they can upgrade their
    own earnings prospects and strengthen their children's future. And we
    have to make available a college education to every person who wants to
    access it.
        And I have made three proposals I want to reiterate here today
    because I think together they would revolutionize the prospects of
    ordinary Americans. The first thing I want to say is everybody who wants
    to go to college ought to be able to go. And I have proposed--I have
    proposed--that's assuming they do the work and deserve to stay. I have
    proposed giving every family a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for
    the cost of college tuition for 4 years for graduate school or whatever.
        But I believe the critical thing here--if you look at how our
    economy is structured, the critical thing is to make 2 years at a
    community college as universal an experience as graduation from high
    school is now. We need to put a 13th and 14th grade into the American
    psyche; every American should think that it's just as essential as
    getting a high school diploma. It ought to become second nature to every
    person.
        And I have proposed also giving families a tax credit, refundable
    for people who don't owe that much tax, of $1,500 a year for the first
    year of community college and a guaranteed $1,500 credit for the second
    year for everyone who maintains a B average. That would open up
    community college to all Americans. That would cover the vast majority
    of tuition bills in all the community colleges in America. It would help
    us to ingrain in people the notion that you can't quit after high
    school. Even if you have to go out and go to work, you ought to be going
    to your community college while you're working.
        And the last thing I want to say is we need to do something for the
    folks in the work force who lose their jobs, who are dramatically
    underemployed. For years and years and years, your Government, I think,
    has hung on to a job training system that doesn't work. There are 70
    different Federal job training programs. You need a slide rule and a
    computer and a place on the Internet to figure out whether you're
    qualified for one of these 70 programs. It breaks your head just
    thinking about it.
        What I'd like to see us do is to get rid of all these programs,
    create a big pot of money, and give people a skill grant when they lose
    their job or if they're underemployed, worth about $2,500 a year and
    say, you can spend up to 2,000 of this at a community college or getting
    an education and training; you can spend 500 searching for a new job.
    You decide how to spend it. The Government doesn't need a bureaucracy to
    tell you that the best place is a community college within driving
    distance of almost everybody in America.
        And I want you to think about it. If we made it possible in America
    for every adult who is stuck in a difficult economic situation to go
    back to community college; if we said we will pay

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    the tuition of every person who is starting in community college for up
    to 2 years; if we said, if you want to go to a 4-year school or to a
    graduate program we would give you a tax deduction for the cost of
    tuition; if we did those things, it wouldn't be long before we would see
    inequality diminishing, the American people growing together the way we
    did after World War II, because the single most important ingredient in
    opportunity for all responsible Americans is having access to an
    adequate education for the 21st century. That is a commitment I think we
    ought to make together.
        And let me just say this as I close: I ask you to think about what
    you wanted your country to look like in the 21st century. I think about
    it in terms of what I want America to look like when my daughter is my
    age and has her own children. I believe this country can be greater than
    it is today. I believe our best days are ahead. I believe if we can find
    a way to deal with the security threats that face all civilized people
    around the world and our problems here at home and if we can create
    opportunity for everybody who is willing to be responsible and if we can
    come together across our differences in a stronger community, that the
    best days of this country are still ahead.
        We can create opportunity for everybody who is responsible enough to
    work for it. We can build a stronger American community and revel in our
    diversity. We can maintain our leadership in the world. It all starts,
    however, with being committed to organize ourselves the way this
    community college is and being committed to giving every single American
    citizen the kind of opportunities that you celebrate here every day.
        Keep up the good work; support it. This is not a partisan issue,
    it's America's future.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:50 p.m. in the Quadrangle. In his
    remarks, he referred to Tracy Tallent, graduate, and Tony Zeiss,
    president, Central Piedmont Community College; and Harvey Gantt, North
    Carolina senatorial candidate.