Remarks in a Discussion With Project GRAD Students at Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark, New Jersey

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 8, 1999

Mr. Freeman. Yes, no matter what, they get that.

The President. And whether you're eligible for college loans and all that. Those of you who have families who can help, they're also entitled to a $1,500 tax credit for what they pay towards your college education. So if you get the scholarship and the Fell grant and your family puts up $1,500, they can get the money back from their taxes.

So if you put it all together now, we pretty much open the doors of college to everybody.

[At this point, the program continued.]

The President. I was out in Los Angeles the other day, the first one of these tours we took called the new market tour, trying to get more investment into our cities. And I went to this program where young people like you who were interested in automotive engineering were designing their own cars by computer. And they had this software program where they could manage--the program would allow them to drive their cars and see how their design worked when they took sharp curves at high speeds, how they handled crashes, how they did everything. It was an amazing thing.

By the time you go to school on this, you could do the whole thing on a computer with a software program to figure out how to build the cars of the future. They're already building automobiles with--experimental cars, for example, with composite materials, that is, not all steel. And I went to the Detroit Auto Show, and they can build cars now that weigh 500 to 1,000 pounds less than the normal car, but that don't get hurt anymore in crashes.

They've always been able to make real light cars to get high mileage and be efficient, but they've been more dangerous. And now the materials are being developed so that we can make very light cars which are much more energy-efficient, pollute the atmosphere a lot better, and which don't get--if anything, they're safer in collisions and crashes.

So it will be very exciting. By the time you get into that, we'll be doing things with transportation we can't even imagine now. And to avoid traffic jams, you'll be able to put a little computer program in your car and just program it, and your car will take you wherever it's necessary to avoid the traffic, which, for people that live in highly congested areas will be a welcome development. You may be the most popular person in your class. [Laughter]

[At this point, the program continued.]

The President. I'll tell you, one great thing about our country is that, of all the countries in the world, we have the best system of undergraduate college education. And so, the good news for you is that we have--there are literally probably 300 schools in America, maybe more, where you can get a world-class undergraduate education in a whole lot of different areas, which means that it's a good thing to have it in your mind where you want to go to school, but you also should remember that you've, got a lot of options, and you can't lose. So it's not like--if you think you want to go one place, and it doesn't work out there, and you get a better deal somewhere else, you really should know that America has--we're so blessed. We've got this wonderful, wonderful system of undergraduate education and colleges where there are literally hundreds of good choices. So you'll all do well.