DEAR Penners: This is a LONG post. I have edited the following:
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INDEPENDENT COLLEGES
(Feb 7. 1996)
2:28 P.M. EST
In this speech, Clinton speaks about economic and social trends
and the importance of education for his 'poly-annaish' view of
the "future" for "America." I thought some of us might be
interested in seeing these kinds of arguments, "from the horse's
mouth." Perhaps I'm wasting my and our time, but, in that case
there's always the delete key.
THE PRESIDENT:
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 every 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
[colleges and universities] 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
hook-ups. The largest and most bureaucratic and most top-down
organizations tend to be slimming 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 three 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.
EDITORIAL: What about the wages and benefits in these new jobs?
The success the US economy and people had in moving from an
agricultural to an industrial society occurred only after a few
decades of suffering (the 1920s and 1930s) for the new industrial
working majority followed by success in the boom years of 1945-
1972 --- a success in large part based on the high wages won by
the successful unionization drive of the 1930s and the low
unemployment years of the 1940s and 1960s. Isn't this good
historical evidence for a high wage strategy in the current
period of transition. Even though he "supports" raising the
minimum wage he never says a word about it to this group ...
maybe because a lot of them outrageously exploit their non-
academic staff with miserable salaries and no unionization!
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.
EDITORIAL: WHy "feeling" more isolated. Aren't they IN FACT
more isolated?
You see, for example, in the United States right now
in the last three 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.
EDITORIAL: Rise in exports means some other country's businesses
are not doing as well. The rise in agricultural exports and
prices is part of the decline of traditional subsistence
agriculture in the rest of the world --- those agricultural price
figures translate into starvation in the third world.
We have in each of the last three 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 by their
own efforts and put something together in the private sector and
made themselves a million dollars doing it.
NO COMMENT!
...
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.
EDITORIAL: Cribbed from Julie Schor and Laura Leete-Guy's work -
- wonder if he read all the rest of _The Overworked American_!
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 nine
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 eight or nine hours a day, but it still took
him nine 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 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 leverage
buy-outs. 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?
EDITORIAL: "these opportunities" are really the chance to be one
of 20 for the few jobs available.
...
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 seven-year
balanced budget plan that protects education and the environment,
and Medicare and Medicaid.
Editorial: This is sickening! I apologize for leaving it in but
... Worse, the audence applauded when he called for agreement to
balance the 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 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.
...
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.
...
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 mind set 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.
EDITORIAL: Now go make another compromise with the timber
industry!
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 warming, in which case they would present a real
threat to our security because we wouldn't be able to breathe --
since they have 1,200,000,000 people and we only have 260
million. This is a very serious thing. And it needs to be a
bipartisan or nonpartisan issue.
...
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.
EDITORIAL: Education does not make one more "community minded" -
- It might just give one the skills and opportunities and
arrogance to go out and screw over your fellow human being!
But if we do it, then the age of possibility will be
for everyone and the 21st century 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 two years of post-high school
education, as a group. Those with under two 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.
EDITORIAL: Why would merely increasing the supply of educated
people increase their incomes? Why wouldn't it DEPRESS the
incomes of those with all that education?
...
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. (Applause.)
Second, one thing that I think that we have not done
as good a job as we should have in the last three 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. (Applause.)
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 16.5 million Americans --
the best kind of tax cut we could have.
EDITORIAL: Wouldn't it also encourage private colleges (and
state ones too with constrained budgets) to raise tuition because
the ability to pay of their students has increased?
We give tax relief for businesses that invest in new
plant and equipment. If we know we're running on brain power,
why shouldn't we give tax relief to families that invest in
education?
EDITORIAL: BUsinesses have political clout!
... 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 five
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 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.
...
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.
IF ANYONE READ IT ALL, I APOLOGIZE FOR THE LENGTH.
Cheers, Mike
