    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [February 24, 1997]
    [Pages 188-189]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher
    Education
    February 24, 1997

        Thank you very much. Good morning. Welcome to the White House. Dr.
    Ponder, Dr. Wilson, Dr. Shaw. Where's Bill Gray? Is he here? You're
    hiding your light under a bushel back there. [Laughter] I wanted to say
    again to all of you how grateful I am to Bill Gray for the historic role
    that he assumed in restoring democracy to Haiti. We've got another year
    behind us now, Bill, and we're still going. Thank you. Dr. Payne and Dr.
    Hackley, Mr. Secretary. I'd also like to thank Catherine LeBlanc for her
    work on the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and
    Universities.
        Welcome to the White House. I'm especially glad you could join us
    during Black History Month as we pay tribute to the contributions of
    African-Americans to American life. None of those has been more
    important than our Nation's historically black colleges and
    universities. When the doors of college were closed to all but white
    students and black people's aspirations were scorned, historically black
    colleges and universities gave young African-Americans the high quality
    education they deserved, the pride they needed to rise above cruelty and
    bigotry, as the graduates and teachers of HBCU's haven't just taken care
    of themselves, they fought for freedom and equal opportunity for all
    other Americans as well. This has been important throughout our history,
    and in the future it will be more important than ever before, because
    education will be more important than ever before. To prepare our people
    for the new century, every young American must have the world's best
    education.
        You know better than anyone how much a difference an education can
    make. To name just a few of the young Americans who were educated at
    HBCU's, you'd have to look at Justice Marshall, Congresswoman Barbara
    Jordan, Reverend Jesse Jackson, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, Nobel
    Prize winner Toni Morrison, and of course Dr. King. Eighty-five percent
    of our Nation's black physicians, 80 percent of our African-American
    Federal judges, 75 percent of our black Ph.D.'s, 50 percent of our black
    business executives and elected officials all were educated at HBCU's.
        Historically black colleges and universities have served with
    distinction, of course, in terms of their contributions to our
    administration: our former Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary; former
    Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders; the Director of Presidential
    Personnel, Bob Nash; and, of course, as the Vice President said, Alexis
    Herman, who is here with us today and who did a superb job for us as
    Director of Public Liaison and, with your help, will be a great
    Secretary of Labor, and I want your help. [Applause] Thank you.
        Over the last 4 years, we have put in place a comprehensive college
    opportunity strategy to make college available to every American
    citizen. I directed the Department of Education and the White House
    initiative on historical colleges to work to increase funding to HBCU's.
    We've made student loans less expensive and much easier to obtain under
    the direct student loan program. AmeriCorps, our national service
    program, has given tens of thousands of young people the chance to earn
    college tuition while serving in their communities. We have created
    already in the last budget 200,000 more work-study positions to help
    students work their way through college, and in the new budget there is
    another 100,000, which will mean we will go from 700,000 to one million
    work-study slots in only 4 years.
        We know that financial aid is critically important. But some of your
    colleges, as many as 90 percent of the students receive financial aid.
    Last year we increased the Pell grant program by 20 percent, taking the
    maximum grant up to $2,700 from about, wherever it was, $2,460. That was
    the biggest increase in 20 years.
        This year's budget is bigger still. It increases Pell grants by
    another 25 percent, the largest increase again in well over 20 years,
    and increases the maximum Pell grant award to $3,000 per year. It
    expands the program to include older students who are starting college
    late or returning to school. It raises the maximum family income level
    to include hundreds of thousands of families who did not qualify for
    Pell grants before. In total, these changes will help almost 350,000
    more families send a family

    [[Page 189]]

    member to college. The balanced budget also includes a $10,000 tax
    deduction to help families pay for college and a $1,500 HOPE scholarship
    tax credit, which is enough to pay for the tuition at the typical
    community college in America for 2 years.
        This college opportunity agenda will open the doors of college wider
    than ever before. Now we need to work to make sure that the Congress,
    without regard to party, will enact these changes into law.
        Before I answer questions now, I'd like to ask for your help with
    one more thing. We all know that literacy is the basic tool of learning.
    But 40 percent of our children cannot read independently by the time
    they're 8 years old. We can and must do better. My budget includes more
    than $2 billion to help us with the literacy challenge, but that is not
    enough.
        I launched our America Reads initiative to mobilize an army of
    reading tutors all across America. And I asked college and university
    presidents to help me achieve that. I sent a senior member of the White
    House staff, Carol Rasco, to the Department of Education to work with
    Secretary Riley to make sure the America Reads initiative does that. We
    have dedicated several thousand AmeriCorps volunteers to becoming
    trained so they can, in turn, train reading tutors to work with schools,
    with parents, and with children to help make sure our children can read.
        But now we need a lot of volunteers--as many as a million--and a lot
    of them will have to come from students. I am pleased to say that over
    80 college presidents have already committed thousands of their work-
    study students to participate as reading tutors. I hope you will join
    them and commit a percentage of your own work-study students to help our
    children learn to read, because without literacy, the job manuals and
    the history books are both closed, and so are the doors of college. We
    need your help to open them wider.
        I'm looking forward to working with you in the months and the years
    ahead but especially this year to make sure that we pass this education
    agenda in Congress, number one, and number two, that we enlist the
    idealism, the ability, and the energy of our young college students in
    helping us to teach our children to read.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:50 a.m. in the State Dining Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to Henry Ponder, president, and
    Harrison Wilson, board of directors chairman, National Association for
    Equal Opportunity in Higher Education; Talbert O. Shaw, president, Shaw
    University; William H. Gray III, president, United Negro College Fund;
    Joyce Payne, director, Office for the Advancement of Public Black
    Colleges; and Vic Hackley, chair, President's Advisory Board on
    Historically Black Colleges and Universities.