[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 6 (Monday, February 12, 1996)]
[Pages 206-213]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

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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.
    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

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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 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 and 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

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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 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.

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    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 despoliation 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 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

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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.
    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 brain power, 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

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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--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--of 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 school teachers 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 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

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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 Michael Adams, 
chair, board of directors, Ann Die, vice chair, and David Warren, 
president, National Association of Independent Colleges and 
Universities; and President Jiang Zemin of China.