Remarks in a roundtable discussion on the School-to-Work program in Nashua, New Hampshire

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 12, 1996

The President. Diana implied that a lot of the benefit was just for young women to see if there were careers that there are actually women involved in and succeeding in that they might not have even imagined beforehand. Do you find that?

[The mentor explained that there are few women in the engineering field, and expressed her hope that the school-to-work program may encourage more women to become engineers.]

The President. Let me ask you one other question. This is just related to that. Can you be a little more specific in telling me what the educational benefits are of working here and how you can continue your education, what the company does?

[The mentor explained that Sanders Lock-heedfully reimburses tuition for higher education.]

The President. The reason I asked you that is one of the issues we are now debating in the context of the balanced budget amendment and what any tax cut should look like and whether there should be one is - I've been urging the Congress to focus on things that will generate higher incomes and greater stability among working people and reward companies for really investing in their people.

The old deduction that companies got for paying for their employees' tuition I think is about to expire, plus which it had certain limits in it. One of the things that I've been urging them to look at is whether or not we ought to have a more generous tax break, both not only to companies but to employees.

There's a general rule in the Tax Code that anything that's deductible to a company is taxable to an employee over and above a certain amount. And it seems to me that we have a huge interest in the United States in seeing that people who are already in the work force continue their education and that the tax system ought never to penalize that, I mean within reasonable bounds.

Anyway that's what we're - one of the things we're looking at as we try to put this whole budget agreement together. I don't think there's a big partisan difference on it. It's not like we're fighting about it; we're more trying to figure out what the right thing to do is and what the best way to encourage employers and employees to take whatever opportunities the employer can possibly afford in terms of time off and the costs of education to go forward. That's why I ask you about it. It's a big issue, folks.

The head of United Technologies gave a speech the other day in which he said he thought that the most urgent economic issue in the country today was the question of educating the people who are already in the work force, because we couldn't go on as a country where half our people were doing pretty well and half our people never got a raise. And so we had to change the whole - he was arguing that we ought to change the whole tax system so that there would always, always be an incentive for employers to help their employees get more education. Anyway, that's why I asked.

[Ms. Devlin described the Teacher in the Workplace program which gives teachers experience working in local companies. The teachers then came back and tailored the curriculum to help students see the meaning and relevance of what they're learning. She then introduced a teacher who participated in that program, and he described his experience.]