Remarks and a question-and-answer session at the Adult Learning Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey - Bill Clinton's speech, March 1, 1993 - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 8, 1993

Judy Kesin. Welcome, Mr. President. We are so thrilled and pleased and honored to have you with us today. And we also would like to welcome Governor Florio, the attorney general Del Tufo, Eli Segal from your office who works with national community service. This is just such a treat. My name is Judy Kesin, and I am the principal of the Adult Learning Center of the New Brunswick Public Schools. We are so thrilled you could visit our program.

|At this point, Ms. Kesin described the center's various educational and community service programs and the involvement of Rutgers University students, and then presented the President with a gift. Several participants then explained how furthering their education and becoming involved in community service has changed their lives.~

The President. Well, first of all, I want to thank everyone who spoke. And maybe in a minute I could give some of you who haven't spoken a chance to say something, if you want to say something.

Let me tell you why I came here today. First of all, I've been very impressed by a lot of the efforts that the State of New Jersey has already made to serve people who need an education and need a second chance and to give people a chance to serve their communities.

Secondly, this center reflects two very important things that I'm trying to do in my national economic program that I'm asking the Congress to pass. The first is what I came here to talk about, and I'm going over to Rutgers to talk to the students about in a few moments, and that is the idea of giving people a chance to serve their country in their community, and in return, giving them the opportunity to further their education.

I've got the gentleman who was introduced here a minute ago with me to my right. Eli Segal and I have been friends since we were about your age, since we were very young. And I've asked him to head up our national and community service program. What we want to do is to provide young people the opportunity to do the following things.

Number one, if you go to college and you have loans outstanding, we want to give people the opportunity to go out in the community and do community service work, work as teachers or police officers or work with the homeless or work in hospitals or work on immunizing children who need it, and doing that for a lower rate of pay for a couple of years and then pay off their college loans by doing the same. Number two, we want to give people some credit for community service they do while they're in college. And number three, we want to give people like you the opportunity to earn some credits to get college or job training by doing community service before you go. So the idea is to make higher education available to more people, in return for the service they give to the community.

Now, in addition to all that, we're going to change the way young people pay their college loans back. We're going to make it possible for people who get out of college to pay their loans back as a percentage, a limited percentage, of their income. Because what happens now is a lot of young people get out of college, they have big college loans. Because they have to pay the loans back, they might want to get out, let's say, and do community service work which doesn't pay very much, but instead they may take a job paying a higher salary just to make their loan repayment. So we're going to try to restructure the college loan program so that if people want to serve over a long period of time, they won't be discouraged from taking community service type jobs just because they pay less. They'll be able to pay their loans back as a percentage of their income.

Now, the other thing I want to emphasize is there's also an investment in this education program that helps centers like this: more money for adult education for people who come back after dropping out of school, more money to help welfare mothers move from dependence to independence, more money to help young people who drop out of school and come back. When I was Governor of my State over the period of about 1983 to 1992, we increased by about 6 times the amount of investment in remaking education programs like this. It just exploded the number of people in it.

Now, why is that an important economic investment? Because this lady with her three children--it wasn't her fault that her husband, first of all, is out of the service and then gets hurt, right? She can either draw taxpayer dollars by taking public assistance, or get an education and pay taxes to educate other people's children. One of the things we have to realize in this country is that an economic investment is not just building an airport or a road or investing in new technology. It's also investing in people who are prepared to help themselves, to make sure that all of you can contribute in a world that is dominated by knowledge, in a world in which the living you make depends on what you know and what you can learn.

And if every person, if every single mother in the United States could stand up and give the speech you just gave with the determination you just gave, it would not only help people like you but you'd be helping people like me. Right? I mean, we're all better off, right? We are. And if you look at our country, if you look at all the different racial and ethnic groups in our country, all the different levels of education, if you look at all the different levels of income, if you look at all the problems we've got, you just think about it--if everybody in our country had a chance to get a really good high school diploma or a GED and then get at least 2 years of education and training beyond that in some way or another, and if all the while they were doing it they were doing community service work, we'd have about half as many problems than we've got, wouldn't we?