[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 35 (Monday, September 6, 1993)]
[Pages 1685-1689]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Opportunity Skyway School-to-Work Program in Georgetown, 
Delaware

 September 3, 1993

    Thank you. I want to say how delighted I am to be back in Delaware. 
You know, when I saw Governor Carper here I was reminded of the time 
back during the election when Senator Biden and I had a big rally in 
Wilmington. And I was pleased to say that I was delighted to be in a 
place where it was

[[Page 1686]]

not a disadvantage to be the Governor of a small chicken-growing State.
    I am delighted to be here today. I can tell all of you are happy, 
too. How could you not be when you see students like Chrissy and Francis 
making those presentations? Weren't you proud of them? They were great. 
Let's give them another hand. [Applause]
    I also want to thank Governor Carper and my former colleague and 
longtime friend, now your Congressman, Mike Castle, and Senator Biden--
without whom I don't think I could function as President--all of them 
for being here today. He is not responsible for the mistakes I make, 
only for the things that go right. [Laughter]
    I want to thank all your State officials for coming here today and 
many of the local officials, and all of you from the various groups. I 
want to say a special word of thanks to the two persons who also spoke 
on the program, Dorothy Shields from the AFL-CIO and my longtime friend 
Larry Perlman who came from a long way away. He lives in Minnesota, and 
he thought enough of this project to come here to represent the American 
business community. This is the sort of partnership that I want us to 
have in America. I'd like to say, too, how much I appreciate the work 
that has been done by this education program, and to Diane and to all 
the others who are here, Carlton Spitzer and others, I thank you for the 
work you have done.
    I came here today not just to showcase these fine students but to 
make the point that every student in America needs the opportunity to be 
in a program like this. I got into the race for President because I was 
very concerned about the direction of my country, a direction that had 
been underway for 20 years under the leadership of people in both 
parties in Washington with forces that are beyond the reach of ordinary 
political solutions. In 1973, real hourly wages for most working people 
peaked in this country, if you adjust them for inflation. For 20 years, 
most Americans had been working a longer work week for the same or lower 
wages, once you adjust them for inflation, while they've paid more for 
health care, housing, and education.
    We have tried a number of things to deal with this issue, to deal 
with the whole question of how do you keep alive the American dream; how 
do you offer each generation of young people a better future than their 
parents had. It is clear to me that we have to revive our economy, all 
right, and we also have to pull our people back together. And the two 
things are inseparable. We need to offer our people more opportunity, 
insist that they assume more responsibility. We need to all be reminded 
that we are in this together. We have to recreate the American 
community. That's why when you see here business and labor and 
government, when you see young people of different racial and ethnic 
groups, when you see people reaching across their party lines, you 
really see the future of America--if it's going to be a good future.
    I picked the two Cabinet members who are here with me today because 
I thought they could help us to create that future. The Secretary of 
Labor, Bob Reich, has been a friend of mine for 25 years and I think has 
written more thoughtfully than any other person I know about the future 
of the American work force and what's happening to us in this global 
economy. The Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, has been my friend for 
about 15 years now, was my colleague and one of the best Governors I 
ever served with on the issues of education and economic development. In 
other words, one of them is at the Labor Department, the other is at the 
Education Department, but they both understand that if you want a good 
economic future, there can be no simple division between work and 
learning. We must do both.
    In the last several months and in the months ahead, you will see a 
lot of publicity about other initiatives of our administration: the 
economic plan that reduced the deficit, increased incentives to invest, 
offered 90 percent of our small businesses a chance to reduce their tax 
burden but only if they reinvest in their businesses and gave tax relief 
to 20 percent of the working poor families in the State of Delaware; the 
reinventing Government program that the Vice President will announce 
next week that will help us to virtually revolutionize a lot of the 
things about the Federal Government, to eliminate waste and inefficiency 
and give all of you better value for your tax dollar; the health program 
that the First Lady has worked on so

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hard for several months now, which will finally give every American 
family the security of knowing they won't lose their health care if they 
lose their jobs or someone in their family is born with a serious 
medical condition and will give the American business community the 
assurance that we're not going to bankrupt the country and wreck the 
economy by continuing to spend more and more and more for the same 
health care.
    I will ask the Congress to approve, with the amendments that we 
secured, the trade agreement between the United States and Canada and 
Mexico because I believe it will create more jobs. And we'll have a 
vigorous debate about that, but I will tell you this: The real problem 
we've got right now in America in creating more jobs is rooted at least 
in part in the fact that our exports are not selling abroad because we 
have too many trade barriers in the world and slow economic growth 
everywhere. Latin America is the second fastest growing part of the 
world. They can buy more of our things, and they should.
    And finally, Senator Biden and I are going to work on a new crime 
bill that will put more police officers on the street and take more guns 
out of the hands of our children.
    All of these are critical to restoring opportunity, insisting on 
more responsibility from our people, and giving America the sense that 
we are one community again. But none of them will work unless we 
maintain a steadfast determination to educate and train our people at 
world-class standards. We are living in a world where what you earn is a 
function of what you can learn; where the average 18-year-old will 
change jobs seven times in a lifetime; where there can no longer be a 
division between what is practical and what is academic. Indeed, one of 
the young students back there said, ``I'm learning a lot more than I 
used to because this is fun.'' Now, that sounds funny, and a lot of you 
clapped when Chrissy talked before, but the truth is there's a lot of 
very serious academic research which indicates that significant numbers 
of our people actually learn better in practical circumstances than they 
do in classroom settings. It's different for different people.
    For two centuries our education system has always been adequate to 
the task and has helped us to keep alive the American dream--an awful 
lot of people here today who wouldn't be doing what you're doing if you 
hadn't had the opportunity to get a good education. But on the eve of 
this new century, when we are struggling so hard to get and keep good 
jobs; when we are struggling hard to reestablish the premise that people 
that work harder and are more productive should earn more money year in 
and year out; a world of instant communication, supersonic 
transportation, worldwide technologies in global markets and a veritable 
explosion of knowledge and invention, we have to face the fact that we, 
while we still have the best system of higher education in the world, 
are the only advanced country without a system to guarantee that every 
student that doesn't go on to a 4-year college institution has the 
opportunity to be in this program or one like it that we're celebrating 
here today. We don't do that.
    So what happens? We see these young people talk and we see these 
young people demonstrate their skills, and our hearts are filled with 
joy, and we're proud, and we know they're going to have a decent future. 
What we don't see here today is that 50 percent of the high school 
graduates in this country do not go on to college, 75 percent of the 
high school graduates in this country don't finish college, and nowhere 
near all of them are in programs like this which should start when they 
are in high school. That is what this is all about today.
    During the 15-year period from 1975 to 1989, the wages of young high 
school graduates, that is, young people who are under 25 who had only a 
high school diploma, dropped about 40 percent in real terms. The wages 
of young high school dropouts, that is, people who are working full-
time, dropped even more. Why? Because of the downward pressure on those 
wages caused by global competition, caused by mechanization, caused by 
all the pressures that you all know. But young people who got at least 2 
years of post-high school training related to a workplace skill for 
which there is a demand in this global economy were overwhelmingly more 
likely to get good jobs with rising incomes.

[[Page 1688]]

    And when you look at the American economy, when you see the 
unemployment rate or you see the income statistics, you know that 
they're grossly oversimplified. If the unemployment rate is 6.8 percent, 
what it really means is that the unemployment rate among people over 40 
with college educations is about 3.5 percent, which is almost zero. 
You've got almost that many people walking around at any given time. But 
the unemployment rate among young people who drop out of high school may 
be 20 percent. And if they happen to live in a place where there's 
already high unemployment, it may be 40 or 50 percent.
    This issue that we're meeting here about today may never acquire a 
great deal of public attention because we're not fighting about it. The 
bill that I introduced shortly before the Congress left has Republican 
as well as Democratic cosponsors. There are labor as well as business 
people up here. We are not having the old fights, but the old fights 
have not provided the new solutions that America desperately needs. And 
that is what we are here today to seek.
    Change is going to happen in this country. No President can promise 
to shield the American people from the changes going on. And anybody 
that tries to is simply not being candid. The real question is whether 
change is going to be the friend of these young people and the rest of 
us or our enemy. And that depends on whether we can adapt to change.
    This program today is an example of what America has to do to adapt 
to change. We can no longer afford to be the only advanced nation in the 
world without a system for providing this kind of training and education 
to everybody who doesn't go on and get a 4-year college degree. We can 
do better. We can have programs like this everywhere. And that's what 
our legislation is designed to do.
    This legislation basically will support learning in the workplace, 
learning in the schoolroom, and connections between the workplace and 
the schoolroom. It will involve all kinds of programs that are working. 
It is not a big Federal top-down program, but we will have some common 
standards: a certificate that means something when you finish a program, 
meaningful learning in the workplace and in the schoolroom, a real 
connection between work and school, and a real chance to get a job. And 
when combined with the other major piece of education legislation that 
we have in the Congress, the Goals 2000 program, which seeks to enshrine 
in the law the national education goals that the Governors adopted along 
with the previous administration of President Bush back in 1989, that 
legislation will establish for the first time a national system of skill 
standards so that you will actually know whether you're learning what 
you're supposed to learn by national standards and whether they stack up 
with the global competition. That is what we seek to achieve, not with a 
new Federal bureaucracy but by building on successes like this.
    This bill involves a historic partnership, too, between the 
Departments of Education and Labor. They will sort of operate like 
venture capitalists. They will provide seed money to States, set the 
goals and the standards, give waivers to communities to give them more 
flexibility as they set up new programs, and require that the graduates 
attain real skill certificates that verify the quality of their 
training. But the design and planning of the programs will be left to 
States and communities and educational institutions who know best how to 
address the local possibilities. Finally, the school-to-work legislation 
will enable our Nation for the first time to create the kind of 
partnership that we so desperately need between schools, businesses, 
labor, and communities, so that we can connect our people to the real 
world. That's why the Business Roundtable, the National Association of 
Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National 
Alliance of Business, the AFL-CIO, and leading Republican and Democratic 
legislators all support this legislation.
    If we are going to prosper in the world toward which we are heading, 
we have to reach out to every one of our young people who want a job and 
don't have the training to get it. We don't have a person to waste. And 
believe you me, when we waste them, the rest of us pay. We pay in 
unemployment. We pay in welfare. We pay in jail costs. We pay in drug 
costs.
    And when we make education come alive, as it has for these young 
people who showed

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me their plane, when we enable students to apply English, history, and 
science to the practical problems of the workplace, we are building a 
future that all of us will be a part of. We must--I will say it again--
we must learn to integrate serious academic study into the workplace, 
starting in high school and continuing for at least 2 years thereafter, 
for everyone who needs it. If we do it, if we do it, we are going to do 
as much as anything else we could do to guarantee most Americans a real 
shot at a good future. And if we don't, all of our other, all of our 
other economic initiatives will be consigned to less than full success.
    I got into this issue when I was a Governor of a State not unlike 
Delaware and I saw too many people working their fingers to the bone for 
less and less and less, too many people who were dying to go to work who 
could never find a job, too many people who didn't have impressive 
academic accomplishments but were plenty smart enough to learn anything 
they needed to know to compete and win in this global economy. I 
determined then as a Governor that if I ever had a chance to do 
something about this in this country, I would. And that's what we're 
here doing today.
    I want you to support this legislation just like you support 
Opportunity Skyway. I want you to support the idea that the public and 
private sectors all over America can do for all of our young people who 
need it what this program has done for the young people we've heard from 
today: provide a smooth transition from school to work. So far, 900 high 
school students have participated in Opportunity Skyway. Many of them 
are en route to careers in aircraft maintenance, avionics, and airline 
piloting. Now they'll find out how much algebra and geography they've 
learned. And I'll say this, I'm on my way back to Washington now using a 
flight plan that the students prepared. Three or four hours from now, if 
I'm wandering out over the Atlantic somewhere--[laughter]--I'll know I 
wasn't very persuasive today.
    There are programs like this one all over the country; we're going 
to build onto them. But we need your help. Next week when the Congress 
comes back, I hope each one of you will do what you can to encourage the 
United States Congress, without regard to party, to embrace this new 
approach to a new economy to give these young people a new future and 
give America a better future. We can make a real difference, folks, a 
real difference if we'll pass this legislation and get about providing 
every young people the opportunity to be as self-assured, as 
knowledgeable, as skilled as the two young people you heard from today. 
That's an important legacy we ought to leave to them.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 10:47 a.m. in the Delmarva Aircraft Hangar 
at Sussex County Airport. In his remarks, he referred to Opportunity 
Skyway participants Chrissy Thomas and Francis Orphe; Larry Perlman, 
chairman and CEO of Ceridian Corp. and chairman of the Business 
Roundtable working group on workforce training and development; and 
Carlton Spitzer, director, Opportunity Skyway.