[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.