THE WHITE HOUSE
				    
		      Office of the Press Secretary
			(Minneapolis, Minnesota)
_________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                      April 24, 1995
				    
			REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
	    TO THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES
				    
			     Grand Ballroom
		       Minnesota Convention Center
			 Minneapolis, Minnesota


11:46 A.M. CDT
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  Secretary Riley,
thank you for your introduction.  If I were you, I would go bowling.
(Laughter.)  We're going to save your job.  (Laughter and applause.)
	     
	     Thank you, Secretary Reich, for your enthusiasm, for being
enthusiastic about the right things.  In your heart alone you have enough
domestic content to be the Secretary of Labor.  (Applause.)
	     
	     Thank you, Jacqueline Belcher and David Pierce.  I also want
to say how very glad I am to be joined here by the distinguished United
States Senator from Minnesota, Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife,
Sheila, who's here.  (Applause.)  Two of our colleagues in the House of
Representatives, Congressman Bruce Vento and Congressman Bill Luther,
also back there.  (Applause.)  Thank you for being here.  (Applause.)
	     
	     I want to say a special word of congratulations to the 20
students who were named to the 1995 All-USA Academic Team.  (Applause.)
I want to thank those who are watching us via satellite.  And I also want
to say a special word about some fine students and advocates I met just
before I came in here.  I met two students who have benefitted from our
direct loan program.  I'll talk more about them in a moment.  Two
students who are critically interested in public assistance to education,
because without that they would not have been able to go to school.  And
I met a gentleman who is devoting his time to organizing people against
the attempt in Washington to start charging interest on student loans
while students are still in college.  Sandra Tinsley, Jessica Aviles,
Jeffrey Lanes, Robbie Dalton-Kirtley, who is also one of the Academic
Team All Americans, and Dave Dahlgren.  I thank all of them for meeting
with me, and they're here somewhere.  If they are, they ought to wave or
stand up -- there's Jeffrey.  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you very
much.  (Applause.)
	     
	     Before I begin today to talk about education and training,
I'd like to say just a word or two if I might before this audience of
educators and people who believe in and appreciate the value of free
speech, about where we are in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, and
what we are going to do about the kind of America our children will
inherit.
	     
	     Yesterday Hillary and I joined tens of thousands of people
in Oklahoma City, and, of course, millions of you all across the country
to witness the end result of abject hatred.  I was there as President to
represent all of you in the mourning.  But also, I felt that we were
there -- Hillary and I -- as ordinary American citizens well -- as
husband and wife, as parents, as neighbors of those people.
	     
	     No words can do justice to how moving it was to be there
yesterday.  No words can do justice to the courage of those who worked in
the rescue operation around the clock.  And one person has already given
her life in that endeavor.  No words can do justice to the small act of
kindness and generosity, all the people in Oklahoma who won't take money
at the gas station or the local coffee shop or the barber shop or even at
the airline ticket terminal for people who are there working to try to
help them put their lives together.
	     
	     But I will never forget, more than anything else, the faces
and the stories of the family members of the victims.  I was walking
through the room shaking hands with them, and I saw a lady with her
children who had been in the Oval Office just a few weeks ago as her
husband left my Secret Service detail to go to what seemed to be a less
hectic pace of duty in Oklahoma City.
	     
	     I saw the children of a man who was a football hero at the
University of Arkansas when so many people who are now on the White House
staff were friends of his.
	     
	     The young Air Force Sergeant took out two pictures his wife
had taken of me just three weeks ago when I visited our troops in Haiti.
And she was one of those troops, but she came home because we wound down
our mission there and she married her fiance.  And three days later she
went to the Federal Building to change her name.  And so he had to give
me the pictures his wife took.
	     
	     I saw three children, teenage children, with a woman and
another child taking care of them.  One of them had one of my inaugural
buttons on.  Their mother died last year of an illness, their father went
to our inaugural -- and they asked me to sign the pin to their father who
is still missing -- three teenagers losing both parents.
	     
	     I could go on and on and on.  I say to all of you, first we
must complete the rescue effort and the recovery effort.  Of course, we
must help that community rebuild.  We must arrest, convict and punish the
people who committed this terrible, terrible deed, but our responsibility
does not end there.
	     
	     In this country we cherish and guard the right of free
speech.  We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we
absolutely deplore.  And we must always be willing to defend their right
to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree.  But we hear so many
loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try
to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn
up and upset with each other.  They spread hate.  They leave the
impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.  You
ought to see -- I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things
that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.
	     
	     Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must
know that their bitter words can have consequences, and that freedom has
endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was
coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the
American people.
	     
	     If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble,
and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well.
And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and
division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have
freedom of speech, too.  And we have responsibilities, too.  And some of
us have not discharged our responsibilities.  It is time we all stood up
and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.  (Applause.)
	     
	     If they insist on being irresponsible with our common
liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties.
When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them.  When they talk of
violence, we must stand against them.  When they say things that are
irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on
it.  The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the
more unforgivable.  So exercise yours, my fellow Americans.  Our country,
our future, our way of life is at stake.  I never want to look into the
faces of another set of family members like I saw yesterday -- and you
can help to stop it.  (Applause.)
	     
	     Our democracy has endured a lot over these last 200 years,
and we are strong enough today to sort out and work through all these
angry voices.  But we owe it to our children to do our part.  Billy
Graham got a standing ovation yesterday when he said, "The spirit of our
nation will not be defeated."  I can tell by your response that that is
true.  But you must begin today.
	     
	     The little girl who read the poem yesterday at our service
said, "Remember the trust of the children.  Darkness will not have its
day."  The trust of the children is what we are here to talk about.
	     
	     This whole community college movement has made as big a
contribution to the future of America as any institutional change in the
United States in decades.  All of you live every day with the future.
You have important work to do.  I ask you only to think of how different
what you do is from what you have been hearing from the voices of
division.
	     
	     Why do community colleges work?  Well, first of all, they're
not encumbered by old-fashioned bureaucracies.  By and large, they are
highly-entrepreneurial.  They are highly- flexible.  They are really
democratic -- small "d" -- they're open to everybody.  Right?  In the
best sense.  (Laughter.)  They are open to everybody.  And people work
together.  And when something doesn't work, they go do something else.
That's what you do.  You do it in a spirit of cooperation.  You are
remarkably unpolitical in that sense.
	     
	     In other words, every experience you have -- and you see
people of all ages coming through your doors, walking out your doors,
going on to better, more fulfilling, more satisfying lives, able to help
themselves and strengthen America in the process.  It is the direct
antithesis of the kind of paranoia and division and hatred that we hear
spewed out at us all over this country, day in and day out, by people
exercising their free speech to make the rest of us miserable.  And it
contradicts the experience of what works in America.
	     
	     So, today, that is why I have asked you to do this.  I also
want to talk to you a little bit about what I hope we can do in
education.  You want Americans to be more hopeful, you want this to be a
more positive place, you want people to be rewarded for their labors --
strengthen education in America, build the community colleges, open the
doors to all.  That's the way to build the future of this country, not by
dividing us and bringing us down, but by uniting us, building us up and
pointing us toward the future.  (Applause.)
	     
	     You know, I have seen the faces of America's future.  I met
a 46 year-old former welfare mother at San Bernardino Community College,
full of enthusiasm and hope for the future.  I met a 73 year-old
Holocaust survivor in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, who built a successful
business and is now committed to investing in the education and training
of his employees using his local educational institution.  I met a
52-year-old woman at Galesburg Community College in Illinois, laid off
from a factory job after 20 years, but building a better future.
	     
	     Today, I met some impressive people.  I met this fine, young
man down here, Jeffrey Lanes, who had an injury but didn't let it defeat
him.  Instead, he went back to school with the help of public assistance
to make a new and better life for himself, but we are better off that he
is going to have a better life.  He is giving us a better America, and we
thank him for it, and we ought to support opportunities for other people
just like him.  (Applause.)
	     
	     I mentioned her before, but when I met Robbie
Dalton-Kirtley, who's part of the All-USA Academic Team -- she's one of
these nontraditional students.  She waited until her youngest child was
in kindergarten, and she went back to school.  She's from Flat Rock,
North Carolina.  But she is building a future that will strengthen not
only Flat Rock, North Carolina, and her family, but all the rest of us as
well.  So I thank you for what you are doing.  And I ask you how we can
do more of it.  And what should we be doing in government?
	     
	     Well, when I ran for President, I ran with a heavy bias
toward education.  I look out on this crowd today and I see a lot of
people from our community colleges in Arkansas.  I'm proud of the fact
that when I was Governor we built more of them; we helped to strengthen
the ones that were there; we helped some of the vocational schools to
either convert or merge or to become more alike by diversifying their
curriculum -- the community colleges.
	     
	     In fact, I was looking at a couple of people out there.  I
was at their places so often they probably wanted me to leave so they
could get some work done when I was a Governor.  (Laughter.)
	     
	     I ran for President in large measure because I felt that the
work of America that was being done out in the grass roots, the work of
creating opportunity and demanding responsibility and rewarding it, was
not being done in Washington -- that we were increasing our government's
debt at a rapid rate, and unbelievably reducing our investment in our
future.
	     
	     I believed then and I believe more strongly now that this
country has two deficits.  We've got a budget deficit, but we've got an
education deficit as well.  And we have to cure them both.  We are still
living with the legacy of the explosive debts of the last 12 years.  The
budget cuts we have made already, and the taxes we have asked the top one
and a half percent of our people to pay -- listen to this -- would
balance the budget to today.  Today we would have a balanced budget
except for the interest we owe on the debt run up between 1981 and the
end of 1992.
	     
	     So we are bringing the deficit down.  We are committed to
that, but we have to remember we have more than one deficit.  You heard
the Secretary of Labor talking about this.  But I have been obsessed
since the late 1980s with the increasing inequality in America.
	     
	     You know, when I was born at the end of World War II, I grew
up in the American Dream.  And the great domestic crisis we had was a
civil rights crisis.  And we thought if we could just get over racial
prejudice that our economy was so strong, our society was so powerful,
that the American Dream could just be opened up for everyone.
	     
	     And from the end of the second world war until the late
'70s, that is pretty much what happened -- all income groups increased
together.  And, in fact, the poorest 20 percent of our people did
slightly better than the rest of us in terms of where they started.  We
were growing together and going forward.
	     
	     Today, we are going forward.  Our economy has produced over
6 million new jobs.  You heard what the Secretary of Labor said -- we had
the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation in 25 years, but
we are not growing together.  And that is why so many Americans say they
do not feel more secure, even though we're having an economic recovery.
They say, "Yeah, I read that in the papers, but its not effecting my
life.  I haven't gotten a raise."
	     
	     Sixty percent of our people are living on the same or lower
wages than they were making ten years ago, working a longer work week.
Why?  Because of the combined impact of the global economy, the
technology revolution, the lack of a government response to it.  In fact,
the government response made it worse.
	     
	     The minimum wage next year -- if we don't raise it this year
-- the minimum wage next year will be at its lowest level in 40 years.
That is not my idea of how to get to the 21st century.  So we have these
-- (applause) -- thank you.
	     
	     So we basically are splitting apart economically.  If you
look at it, it is clear that the fault line is education.  Earnings for
high school dropouts have dropped at a breath-taking rate in the last 15
years.  Earnings for high school graduates have dropped at a less
dramatic rate.
	     
	     The only group for which earnings have increased steadily
are earnings for people who have at least two years of post-high school
education and training.  You, you are at the fault line in America.  The
fault line of American society is education.  Those who have it are doing
well.  Those who don't are paying.  And the future offers more of the
same at a faster rate.
	     
	     Therefore, it is clear that our common mission, if we want
to help people help themselves and strengthen this country, must be
focused on a relentless determination to see that every American lives up
to the fullest of his or her capacities.  It is in our common interest.
	     
	     So all these wonderful stories you can tell about your
community colleges, all these touching individual triumphs, are also the
story of America's rebirth at the dawn of the 21 century.  Make no
mistake about it, you are doing more than helping individual Americans
live out their dreams, you are creating the system in which we can keep
the American Dream alive for our country and the American idea alive for
all the world in the 21st century.  If you succeed, we will.  You must
succeed, and the rest of us must make sure we do what we can to help you
do it.  (Applause.)
	     
	     I want to make some brief points today about what we are
trying to achieve in this Congress and what we are trying to stop from
being achieved in this Congress.  And I want to ask for your help.
	     
	     In the last two years, we had broad bipartisan support for
the most substantial increased effort by the national government to
support education in a generation -- big increases in Head Start;
world-class standards for our schools and more flexibility for our
teachers, our parents, our administrations and our students to meet them;
school to work programs so our young people who don't go on to four-year
colleges would have the opportunity to move into the workplace with the
kind of training and skills that would give them jobs that would raise
their incomes, not drive them down; tech-prep programs as a part of
school to work.  A lot of you are involved in the tech-prep issue, and
it's something I know a lot about from my personal experience, enabling
high school students to get work experience and to go straight to
community colleges.
	     
	     We created AmeriCorps, our national service initiative.  And
more than 30 community colleges and this association are participating in
AmeriCorps.  We've got people doing everything from helping the elderly
in Kentucky, to tutoring kids in inner-city Chicago, to helping with
community policing in Rochester, New York -- thanks to the community
colleges.  And I thank you very much for your endeavors.  (Applause.)
	     
	     Now, what should we do?  Number one, do no harm.  Don't undo
what we just did.  Number one, do no harm.  Number two, yes, we need to
reduce the deficit, but we should increase the Pell Grant program as we
have proposed, not reduce it, as some have proposed.  (Applause.)  Yes,
we should cut the deficit, but one way to cut the deficit that is
absolutely wrong is to start charging interest on student loans while the
students are still in school.  (Applause.)
	     
	     There is an answer, you know, in education to the budget
conundrum.  Almost unbelievably there is an answer.  It is our direct
student loan program.  We want to make it available for anyone who wants
to finance assistance to college.
	     
	     The student loan program, the direct loan program, started
when I became President because I wanted to find a way to cut the cost of
college loans, to cut the unbelievable bureaucratic paperwork headache,
and to give students more options about how to repay loans, because I
began to see students in our state who were dropping out of college
because they were terrified that they would never be able to repay their
loans, especially students who were going to do things that were
important to our society but didn't pay a lot, students who wanted to be
teachers, students who wanted to be nurses, students who wanted to be
police officers.  Students who wanted to serve the public and knew that
they would have big loans and modest salaries to repay them with.  So we
began to look around for ways to do this.  And we settled on, and the
Congress adopted, the direct college loan program.
	     
	     When I took office, everybody in the country was complaining
about the way the student loan program worked.  Students complained that
they couldn't get loans or if they did it took them too long, and it was
an absolute nightmare to fool with the paperwork.  Colleges complained
that the paperwork was driving them crazy.  And everybody was worried
about the nature of the repayment terms and the fact that there weren't
enough options.  There was also, I might add, an unconscionable amount of
loan default, people who would not pay their loans back, costing the
taxpayers $2.8 billion a year.  And the banks didn't have much incentive
to help, because they had a 90 percent guarantee.  So by the time -- if
they brought some sort of action, they'd spend the 10 percent trying to
college the rest.  So why not just take a check from the government?
	     
	     Well, the direct loan program addresses all those problems.
It lowers costs for students.  It allows borrowers to choose flexible
repayment arrangements, including a pay-as-you- earn option.  Therefore,
it doesn't doom anyone to a crushing debt burden.  It's also, believe it
or not, helping us to save billions of dollars of taxpayers' money.
That, plus Secretary Riley's more vigilant enforcement of the loan
program, have cut your losses as taxpayers from $2.8 billion a year to $1
billion a year -- a reduction of almost two-thirds.  (Applause.)
	     
	     But get this -- what are we going to do now?  In the first
year, we had 104 schools with over 252,000 students in the program.  In
the second year, we'll have more than 1,400 schools representing 37
percent of all loans committed to enrolling.  Today I am proud to
announce that in our third year, beginning July 1996, 450 new schools
will join the program which will mean 45 percent of all student loans
will be administered through this program.
	     
	     Now, that's the good news.  You don't have to take my word
for it.  You can look at the students that I just mentioned -- Jessica
Aviles or Sandra Tinsely -- they're both here.  Go ask them about it.
Listen to them talk about how much quicker they got the loan and what a
joy it was not to have to go through the hassle and the delay and the
uncertainty.
	     
	     But here's the good news.  If we keep going until we make
the student loan program available to all the schools on a voluntary
basis, it will save the taxpayers $12 billion over five years, or about
the same amount of money that would be saved if we started charging
interest on student loans while the students are in college.
	     
	     So if we want to reduce the deficit, let's reduce the
deficit by increasing education, not by reducing it.  That's the message
that I want you to take out there.  (Applause.)
	     
	     The second thing I want to say to you is that we have a lot
of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed who want more training
and education.  And a lot of them now only have access to certain
highly-specified and difficult-to- understand and access government
programs.  There are dozens of federal training programs -- most of them
enacted with the best of intention by Congress.
	     
	     What we proposed to do is to put the American people who
need training in control of their own destiny with these programs,
instead of just shifting the power from a federal bureaucracy even to a
state one, what we propose to do is to consolidate all these training
programs and create a skill grant, essentially a training voucher to
people who are unemployed or underemployed or qualified for federal help,
let them get the voucher, and take it to their local community college
and have access to the programs you offer for up to two years to get the
training necessary for the future.
	     
	     That is a much better expenditure of that money than to
continue in these programs which may or may not be easily accessible and
which require a whole lot of paperwork and are very confusing.  We want
to consolidate the money, give it directly to the people who are entitled
to it in the form of a voucher, and let them take it to you to get the
education you need.  I hope you will help us pass that as well in this
Congress.  (Applause.)
	     
	     Finally, let me talk about the tax cut issue.  Everybody is
for a tax cut.  Who could be against it?  Sounds great.  But I would
remind you that this a serious issue, this deficit issue.  We have worked
very hard to reduce it by $600 billion.  When we brought the deficit
down, that's what drove interest rates down in 1993.  That's what gave us
our economic recovery.  That's what unleashed the engine of American
enterprise.  And the uncertainty that hangs now around whether we
continue to show discipline in our budget is causing difficulties for our
economy.
	     
	     We cannot afford a $200 billion tax cut and continue to
reduce the deficit and meet our responsibilities to education and our
future.  We cannot afford to tilt most of the benefits of the tax cut to
upper-income people.  They are doing very well in the economy as it is.
They are doing very well.  And this is not a statement of class warfare.
I want to create more millionaires.  I am proud of the fact that a lot of
people have become millionaires since I have been President.
	     
	     But what will do that is a strong economy, a healthy economy
in which everybody has the opportunity to succeed.  That's what will
create more successful entrepreneurs.  If we have a system that grows the
middle class and shrinks the underclass and keeps this economy strong,
the entrepreneurs will do well.
	     
	     So what we should do is have a much smaller tax cut.  It
should be targeted sharply to people who need it, middle class people.
And in my judgement it should be targeted to education.  People should
get a deduction for the cost of education after high school, because that
will raise their incomes over the long run as well as over the short run.
They will more than pay it back to the treasury in future years because
we will be accelerating the number and the intensity and the pace of
those getting an education in America.  That's the kind of tax cut we
need -- less -- target it to middle class and focused like a laser beam
on education.  We need an education tax cut.  That's all we need for this
country.  (Applause.)
	     
	     Let me close by asking you once again to make your voice
heard in another way.  The community colleges of America look like
America.  If you go to a board meeting of a community college and hear
people talk about what programs they're going to have and what projects
they're going to have and what partnerships they're going to create,
chances are a hundred to one you can't tell whether there's a Republican
or a Democrat talking at the board meeting.
	     
	     Community colleges are open to people of all races and
backgrounds and religious and faiths and views.  They bring people
together.  They are America at its best.  We need more of that in
Washington.  So if you believe that we shouldn't start charging interest
on the loans, especially since there's a better way to reduce the
deficit; if you believe we should increase the Pell Grants, not decrease
them; if you believe we should keep expanding the direct loan program on
a purely voluntary basis and see if our program is as good as I think it
is, and people keep using it; if you believe we should have this training
voucher instead of this complicated welter of Federal programs; if you
believe it's important to cure the education deficit and the budget
deficit, and therefore we should focus on a tightly targeted education
related tax cut, then go back home and ask the students and the faculty
members and the board members to sign petitions that you can send to your
local members of Congress and your senators, without regard to party.
	     
	     We dare not let education become a political partisan issue
in America.  It was not in the last two years; it should not be in 1995
and 1996.  Every American has a vested interest in seeing that we all go
forward in education.  Every single, solitary bit of evidence shows us it
is the fault line standing between us and a future in which the American
Dream is alive for everyone.  If you want to reward hard work in America,
that work must be smart work.  Our future is on the line.
	     
	     So I implore you, when you go home, make your voices heard.
Say it is not a partisan issue, it is not a political issue.  It is a
question of keeping the American Dream alive into the 21st century.
	     
	     Thank you and God bless you all.  (Applause.)

                               END12:25 P.M. CDT