Remarks on the first anniversary of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 in White Plains, Maryland

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 22, 1995

One thing that I want to emphasize that is very important is that the school-to-work program rests on a few very big ideas. One of the ones that's most important to me is that there is no choice to be made between practical workplace skills and academic knowledge, that the two reinforce each other and go hand in hand. When I was growing up, there was always this bright line between what was a vocational practical skill and what was an academic skill. It was probably a mistake then; it is certainly a mistake now. We have to abolish that line.

School-to-work is for all kinds of students. After high school, some will go straight to a job, some will go on to a community college, others may go to a 4-year college. Some who hadn't planned on getting more education will get more education because they were in the school-to-work program and because they see it will help them in their work lives.

Our country has enormous potential and a few very large problems. You know what they are as well as I do. You know we have too much crime and violence. You know we have major pressures on the family and the community in our country. What you may or may not know is that underlying a lot of this is the fact that more than half the people in this country today are working a longer work week than they were 10 years ago for the same or lower wages. And the reason is we have not created in this country the kind of education and training programs we need to adapt to a global economy, where everybody's earnings are to some extent conditioned on the pressures being put on us from around the world and where everybody's earnings more and more depend upon not only what they know, but what they are capable of learning.

In the last 15 years, for example, earnings for high school dropouts in the work force have dropped at breathtaking rates. They're about 25 percent lower than they were 15 years ago. Earnings for high school graduates are not down that much, but they're also down significantly.

The only people for whom earnings have increased in the last 15 years are people who get of high school with usable skills and have at least some kind of education and training for about 2 years after high school. It can be in the work place; it could be in the service; it could be in a community college; it can be in a college, but you have to create this sense of ongoing upgrading of the skills if we're going to grow the middle class and shrink the under class in this country. If we could do that, a lot of our other problems would be smaller.

I want to emphasize again that this has been a bipartisan effort, which perhaps ought more properly to be a nonpartisan effort. After all, in the post-cold-war era, there are certain things that are critical to the American dream; growing the middle class and shrinking the under class and giving people the chance to help themselves is clearly that. We ought to have partisan differences over how best to achieve that goal, but we ought to be committed to that goal. And if you're committed to a goal, very often you wind up agreeing on the details.