Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at NYU
“U.S. Public Policy for Higher Education:
Increasing Access, Quality and Completion by 2020”
Remarks of Dr. Martha Kanter, Under Secretary
NYU Silver Center – New York, New York
Monday, November 7, 2011 – 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Good evening. It is an honor to join you for this important conversation about
education, innovation, and the vital role of America’s colleges and universities in
preparing students for the opportunities and challenges of the 21 st century.
A historic task has fallen to all of us – but especially to the masters’ and doctoral
degree candidates in the audience, who are our next generation of educational leaders.
The time has come to rethink higher education in this country, even as we work to
extend its great legacy as an engine of our economy and a bulwark of democracy.
You asked me here to speak about the Administration’s higher education policy,
but you also asked how my views evolved as a teacher, a professor, a dean, a college
president and a policymaker. Here first are some brief reflections.
Teaching is in my DNA. Growing up, I was a natural-born organizer, especially
when it came to corralling my three younger brothers. I was the one who set the
fairness ground rules for our enormously elaborate clay fights, and the strategic military
upheavals in our living room. I learned to referee fights, solve problems, pose big
challenges for us to conquer and influenced their trajectories – all qualities I think a
leader should have in our fast-changing global knowledge economy.
In the 1960s, I took my siblings to the World’s Fair in Montreal and to many civil
rights protests. We couldn’t help being aware, growing up in Boston, of the fight for civil
rights – and experiencing the struggle for justice up close left a lasting impression on
me.
I can't ever remember not working – when I was in high school, I taught reading in
an after school program at the South End House in Roxbury, Massachusetts. In
college, I worked for Dr. Abraham Maslow at Cumbres, his East Coast center for human
potential and was a teaching assistant apprenticed to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, now at
the Harvard Business School. While pursuing my master's degree, I worked as a
secretary for six doctors and I kept on working as my career evolved.
Throughout all of this, I learned that the more I expected of others, the more they
accomplished. And I learned to speak up and speak out, especially when the
undiscussables needed to be discussed.
And, I’ve always had vision. Walking around my campuses for sixteen years
before I came to Washington, I envisioned buildings that hadn’t been built. I saw a
multi-cultural, multi-ethnic community of professors, deans, staff and students, even
though we weren’t diverse in those early years. I worked hard to understand which
decisions would most affect the future, and treasured each opportunity to open doors for
the new majority to come to college.
When I accepted my current position in Washington, I wasn’t looking for a new
job. Education had been my career for some 40 years. For the 16 years before I
received “the call” from Secretary Arne Duncan, I’d been a college president, and most
recently, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California,
one of the largest community college districts in the nation, educating 45,000 students a
year.
Still, from an early age, I had been taught that when that call to service comes,
you go … but you make sure you know who’s calling. So, when Secretary Duncan
called, I went to meet him – eager to know more about the Obama Administration’s
vision for education.
We talked candidly about the impact of early learning, K-12 and higher education
on our nation’s students and families, and I shared my deep concerns about the
gathering storms coming at us:
• the thousands who can’t access or are shut out of higher education,
• whether our democratic society in the larger sense would survive the threats,
and
• the urgency for America’s families, policymakers and Congress itself to
understand the fundamental purpose and value of higher education.
Secretary Duncan shared President Obama’s robust vision for education, and his
own plans to increase student access and achievement in our K-12 schools, his belief in
the importance of higher education and workforce training, his conviction that lifelong
education starts with early learning, his recognition that a high school diploma must
signify college readiness, his commitment to high academic standards and quality
assessments , and his strong record as superintendent of Chicago’s public schools.
I unequivocally accepted his offer to join Obama’s education team — because
education is a top priority for President Obama, Secretary Duncan and our entire
administration. And – simply – because we owe it to our students and to future
generations.
We all know that most of our students enter higher education with enormous
challenges, often having overcome great adversity in their lives. I came to this position
to focus increasing academic achievement and success for all students.
The trends in postsecondary access and completion won’t improve unless quality
is the driving force of our work. Students must be able to depend on higher education
to ensure their success in the digital age, the global economy, and our knowledgebased society.
So now, let me tell you about this Administration’s agenda to help accomplish
exactly that. I’ll open with the touchstone for all our work: the bold goal President
Obama set shortly after taking office. I’ll describe the challenging climate that makes
this goal both so difficult, and so necessary, to achieve. And, I’ll highlight the specific
milestones that will be required of all of us, in order to reach the goal.
I’ll also offer some details of our federal access, quality and completion agenda,
and highlight some initiatives we’ve launched to meet the 2020 goal by dramatically
increasing innovation, efficiency, and productivity – and by investing in and scaling up
what truly works to improve student learning and success. I’ll also note some efforts
that promise to help move us forward at the institutional, state and national levels.
But, let me first take a moment to thank NYU and the wonderful team at the
Steinhardt Institute. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that my niece
attends the medical school here at NYU! As one of the largest private universities in
this country, with a diverse student body, it is natural for America to look to NYU to help
set the pace of change, and this institution is delivering excellence and innovation on so
many fronts.
You have a retention rate of 92% for full-time – and 62% for part-time – degreeseeking students. And, your graduation rate of 86% within six years far exceeds the
U.S. average of 57%.
You have a distinguished record in the fields of Science, Technology, Math and
Engineering along with your affiliate, Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Institute of NYU – the
second oldest school of engineering and technology in the country – and you contribute
to cutting-edge research through facilities like the Nelson Institute of Environmental
Medicine.
2
You’ve established yourself as the first global network university, with a
comprehensive liberal arts campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, as well
as study and research sites in China, Ghana, Germany, Argentina, England, Israel, and
a host of other countries.
Right now, you administer over $20 million in federal education grants and
fellowships. The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development is
also partnering with our federal Institute for Education Statistics to sponsor a predoctoral interdisciplinary training program.
And, our Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Dr. Jack
Buckley, is on leave from the NYU faculty and is already bringing tremendous thought
leadership to our Agency and the nation.
So, I applaud your dedication and vision, and thank you for your many
contributions to our field. Your leadership has never mattered more.
In fact, at no time has education mattered more to the future of our nation, the
prosperity of our states, and the ability of individual Americans to succeed. In higher
education, we need bold and decisive action to increase equity and excellence – and to
expand and accelerate pathways to degrees, certificates and lifelong learning. We
need graduates who can think critically, who can innovate and who can work in diverse
teams across borders to analyze and solve the most pressing problems facing our
nation and our world. We need graduates prepared to engage actively in civic life at
home, to help better our global society, abroad and to spread the shared values of our
democracy wherever we can.
At the same time, we need to preserve our leadership on the world stage. In a
global economy, nations that out-educate us will out-compete us. As soon as he took
office, the President issued an ambitious challenge: by 2020, for America once again to
have the world’s best educated, most competitive workforce, and the highest proportion
of college graduates of any nation.
The President’s bold vision is the driving force behind our national completion
agenda. And, the challenge to help our postsecondary institutions realize the promise
of the 21st century for our nation’s growing and diverse students demands all our
urgency, energy, and ingenuity.
In the years ahead, more than 60% of jobs will require a postsecondary
education as noted in the Help Wanted report from Georgetown University’s Center on
Education and the Workforce. Of the 30 fastest growing occupations in America, half
require a Bachelor's degree or more in fields such as healthcare, STEM, and teaching,
to name a few.
University degrees and certificates matter! But we need assurance that they
represent quality. The challenge for the United States is to get more of our students into
and across the finish line of higher education and this goal has never been more urgent.
And, as data from College Board indicates, students with more education make
more and put more back into the economy. But today, twenty-five percent of our
students drop out of high school. In STEM, American 15 year-olds recently scored 25th
out of 29 developed nations on international math exams, and 17 th out of 30 in science.
Sixty percent of college students need remediation and only half of college students
obtain their degrees in six years. And half of that earn a community college degree in
three years.
Right now, employers in many sectors struggle to find applicants with the right
knowledge, skills and credentials. The result is more than 2 million unfilled jobs, at a
time when the U.S. faces the highest unemployment rate in generations. And as
3
McKinsey shows in this slide, over the next decade demand for workers will outpace
supply if we don’t address the mismatch.
Given the ever-evolving face of America, our completion agenda must embrace
every one of America’s students. Yet right now, a significant completion gap persists for
most students of color.
It is morally unacceptable and economically unsustainable – in short, it is
contrary to our nation’s founding values – when some Americans, due to background,
race, or income level, must struggle harder than others for a chance at the American
Dream. We have to close the achievement gap. Generations hang in the balance, and
we all know it.
Similarly, study after study has shown that low-income students graduate at
lower rates. These achievement gaps have persisted far too long and, when we look
across the states, we see tremendous variability and inconsistency in the rate at which
students from our nation’s poorest families earn their degrees and certificates.
With increased accountability and transparency, institutions are required to
display how low-income students are progressing on the road to completion. But as you
can see, there is tremendous variability and inconsistency in the outcomes of lowincome students at our nation’s institutions of higher education across our states.
Clearly graduation, and not just enrollment, is our ultimate goal. But access is a
necessary step on the path to completion. So here, let me speak briefly about our
efforts to open the door to higher education to more Americans.
This administration's commitment to higher education access and affordability is
unprecedented.
We’re proud of the fact that, since the President took office, we’ve more than
doubled Pell Grant funding, and seen a 50% increase in the number of Pell Grant
recipients. In 2008, 6 million college students received Pell Grants; today, more than 9
million are enrolled in college, made affordable with Pell grant support.
The maximum grant is almost a thousand dollars higher today. Today, three
million more college students received a Pell Grant than before Barack Obama was
elected President. You could fill every seat of every professional football stadium, and
every major league baseball stadium, with students - poor and working class students and that would be just over three million.
We’ve tripled the size of higher education tax benefits. The HOPE credit used to
be available for two years. The American Opportunity Tax Credit is 75 percent larger,
available for four years, and almost half of it is refundable for low-income families. The
American Opportunity Tax Credit makes college more affordable, and the transfer to
further postsecondary education more seamless.
Net college costs are still too high almost everywhere, but if we hadn’t dedicated
one in every seven Recovery Act dollars – or over $100 billion – to education, those
costs would be a lot higher. Those Recovery Act funds have been a lifeline for states.
And, while we're not happy about the rise in student debt, we are making it more
affordable. Income-based repayment – and you’ll be hearing a lot more about that over
the next few years - is one of the most important for the middle class. Under new rules
the President announced two weeks ago, new graduates’ loan payments will be capped
at 10 percent of discretionary income. That’s an important development for this year’s
graduates, who are entering a tough job market with historically high student loan debt.
Finally, we stabilized the federal student loan program, cut the middlemen out of
the loan business, and saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Most of that money
was plowed right back into college access in the form of Pell Grant funding.
4
And, through the American Jobs Act, the President has once again shown his
commitment to investing in education, for our nation’s long-term economic prosperity.
His proposal includes $30 billion for teacher jobs and another $30 billion for school
repair and modernization – including $5 billion to help community colleges, which have
seen record enrollment increases, and are essential to meeting the 2020 goal. We
hope Congress will show leadership by enacting key pieces of this crucial bill.
Overall, today, 41% of Americans aged 25-to-34 earn a 2- or 4-year degree. The
latest comparisons from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
show that young adults in the U.S. now rank 16th worldwide in college attainment. By
comparison, 63% of young South Koreans and 56% of young Canadians have a
degree.
By every measure our students are being outpaced by other countries, and that
means they face higher prospects of unemployment because, in the information age,
there are no good jobs for high-school dropouts … and fewer for those with only high
school diplomas. In fact, the unemployment rate for college grads is around 4%
compared with 10% or more for the nation as a whole.
Americans everywhere need to shed our complacency about the performance of
our students and work harder to raise our standards and expectations for what students
are able to learn and accomplish.
We know these challenges come at a time when too many of our universities are
straining to meet skyrocketing demand with plummeting resources, as displayed in this
slide from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
We’ve seen similar findings in the recently-released report from Dr. Jane
Wellman and her colleagues from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs,
Productivity, and Accountability. They found that, though tuition increases at Public
Master’s universities were historically high in fiscal year 2009, they still fell far short of
covering decreases in state funding – making up just 38% of the difference in state cuts,
as measured on a per-student basis. Today, we have an increasing number of public
state university systems receiving less than 50% of their funding from the state.
All these student statistics and fiscal data tell us that the President’s goal is even
more ambitious than we realized.
Nonetheless, I’m confident that together we can create and deliver the
environment for education reform that will dramatically improve student achievement
and – at the same time - level the playing field for our nation’s youth and adults across
the country.
To meet the 2020 goal, we must graduate 10 million more students from
community colleges, four-year colleges and universities – that’s 8 million more
graduates beyond the 2 million already expected due to normal growth – 5 million from
state colleges and universities and 5 million from community colleges. We must also
make it possible for every American to complete at least a year of higher education or
advanced training, in his or her lifetime.
Producing ten million more graduates means lifting our college degree attainment
rate from 41% percent to 60% for Americans between the ages of 25-to-34, with a third
coming from an increase in high school graduates and two-thirds coming from the adult
population.
That’s why we prepared a road map for what Secretary Duncan calls our “cradleto-career” education reform movement. It starts with stronger, more comprehensive,
more inclusive early childhood programs. It continues by focusing on building a worldclass P-12 system; boosting student outcomes through higher standards and better
5
assessments; recruiting and retaining more highly effective teachers – especially in high
need schools – and tackling the dropout rate.
And, our road map culminates in efforts to make college more accessible and
affordable, and to increase quality and degree completion for students – from teens
straight out of high school, to adult learners, workers, unemployed Americans, and new
immigrants.
Anyone seeking a better life should be able to find the right options and pathways
to success, through our nation’s schools, colleges and universities. By building these
pathways, and strengthening our cradle-to-career pipeline, we can again have, in
President Obama’s words, the “best educated, most competitive workforce in the world.”
President Obama is the first President in more than half a century to focus so
intently on access, quality and completion throughout the full range of our
postsecondary system. The challenges included in this agenda are:
• Introducing students earlier to the full range of higher education options;
• Ensuring smoother, better-articulated transitions at all stages of the education pipeline;
• Inspiring and engaging students every step along the way with problems to solve that
matter;
• Ensuring that degrees and certificates represent the quality education that our
students deserve;
• Accelerating pathways to degree completion;
• Becoming more transparent about student learning outcomes; and
• Preparing ever-more diverse student populations to achieve their potential
academically, professionally, civically and globally.
Many states and institutions have already begun to set completion targets to
increase high school and college graduates and to report regularly on the progress they
are making toward their goals. We especially have to recognize the National Governors
Association and Complete College America here. Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and
Washington are states with the strongest momentum in terms of the number and
breadth of completion initiatives. Each of these vanguard states has a wide range of
efforts to address most if not all of the seven areas in the College Completion Toolkit we
published last spring and is found on the White House website. And, Arkansas,
Colorado, Nevada and Oklahoma are among the states poised to join the front ranks.
This slide shows some of the states that are leading the way.
Streamlining transfer and articulation policies, focusing on college and career
readiness, implementing performance-based funding, reaching out to adults with some
college but no degree, supporting accelerated learning models with the use of
technology, implementing strategies to keep college affordable, and taking bold steps to
increase both efficiency and productivity – all of these efforts will help us gain
momentum to reach the 2020 goal.
California, Hawaii, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee, and West Virginia are
implementing policies that enable seamless, automatic transfer among colleges
throughout the state.
And, some years ago, Arizona implemented a number of transfer-related policies;
the Arizona General Education Curriculum boosted graduation rates in the state’s
university system (72.2 % of those who had completed the AGEC had graduated by
2008, but only 55.7% of those who hadn’t); and a study completed in 2007 found that
Arizona transfer students on average reduced the number of university credits to
receive a baccalaureate degree by 12 credits. Similarly, during the period that Ohio
implemented performance-based funding, graduation rates improved.
6
States and institutions are also exploring ways to minimize tuition hikes, from
tuition and net-price freezes, to tuition locks for student cohorts, to indexing tuition to
inflation.
A variety of institutions and systems are implementing management and
administrative efficiencies to reduce expenses and to centralize, streamline, and share
costs and functions. These are models that higher education can use to increase
productivity without sacrificing instructional quality.
It’s also important to increase readiness, as we increase quality. College costs
more when students have to retake classes due to poor grades, or take remedial
courses because they are not prepared for college level work. If we can eliminate the
need for remediation, institutions can devote some 15% more revenue toward
accelerating degree completion. Better-prepared students can graduate in under 6
years, save 25-50% on a college education, and more readily attain the skills and
credentials for fulfilling careers.
Already there are a host of promising pathways to promote on-time or even
accelerated degree attainment – from dual enrollment, dual credit programs offered
collaboratively by high schools, community colleges and four-year institutions – to
innovative dual-degree programs that allow students seamlessly to acquire an associate
and a bachelors, locking in their tuition rate for four years, and connecting eligible
students with scholarships. Models like these are taking hold in states from Indiana to
New York, and from Illinois to Texas.
We’re also seeing other national and multi-state consortia gain momentum, from
Achieve’s “American Diploma Network” – dedicated to making sure every high school
graduate is prepared for college or work – to completion efforts launched by the
National Governors Association, the Education Trust, and the 24-state-strong Complete
College America Alliance, to name a few.
Each of these efforts – and many more – are important steps that point our
institutions and states to achieve the 2020 goal, securing our nation’s prosperity, and
preserving the American Dream for future generations.
We’re also using the lever of transparency as part of President Obama’s Open
Government effort to help institutions and states make progress toward the 2020 goal.
Here’s an example of a clickable map where anyone can find out how these institutions
are meeting the 2020 goal in a particular state. We’ve also published not only
graduation numbers and rates but also loan default rates and – this spring – earnings of
students in programs leading to gainful employment.
At the federal level, in March, Vice President Biden released the College
Completion Toolkit I mentioned to give Governors, state leaders and institutions the
best information and ideas we could gather from across the country – to promote
college quality and completion policies and strategies.
The Toolkit offers seven strategies to boost completion, with examples of steps
that states, national consortia, and other higher education entities are taking to
implement each one. They are:
 First, Set Goals and Develop an Action Plan;
 Second, Embrace Performance-based Funding;
 Third, Align High School Standards with College Entrance and Placement
Standards,
 Fourth, Make it Easier for Students to Transfer Among Colleges;
 Fifth, Use Data to Drive Decision-making;
 Sixth, Accelerate Learning and Reduce Costs; and
7
 Seventh, Target Adults, Especially Those with ‘Some College but no Degree.’
We’re also launching other resources and initiatives, from our data dashboard to a
Request for Information asking our 6200 institutions of higher education to tell us what
works in increasing college completion and to describe their evidence base for their
findings.
Overall, we will use all the levers at our disposal to identify and help scale up
what states and institutions are doing to increase the quality of student learning, student
persistence – and ultimately, degree completion and success in their lives.
Open Educational Resources also have tremendous potential to boost
innovation, engage students, improve access and quality, accelerate completion, and
ultimately, reduce costs. That’s why we’re investing aggressively in innovative education
technology.
For example, we’ve proposed $90 million dollars for a new “Advanced Research
Projects Agency” for Education, to fund projects led by industry, universities, and other
organizations. Just as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA helped develop the Internet, GPS, and robotics, ARPA-ED would aggressively pursue
breakthrough technologies with potential to transform teaching and learning.
Moreover, in accord with our National Education Technology Plan, we just
launched “Digital Promise” – the new national center for research in advanced
innovation and digital technologies. Digital Promise will focus on cutting-edge research
and development at the intersection of the learning sciences, technology and education
– with a distinguished board of experts setting its R&D agenda.
Today in
Washington, Secretary Duncan is launching the Learning Registry, a new approach to
capturing, sharing, and analyzing learning resource data to broaden the usefulness of
digital content to benefit teachers and learner. It’s an open source technical system
designed to facilitate the exchange of data supported by an open community of
resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers interested in collaborating to
broadly share resources and information about how those resources are used by
educators in diverse learning environments across the Web.
Looking ahead, in his 2012 proposal, President Obama announced $120 million
for a “First in the World” Competition, to increase college completion and promote
productivity in higher education.
To dramatically improve student learning outcomes, we need to encourage
higher education partnerships with K-12, business, labor and government to field test
and put in place innovative solutions to address the completion challenge, build
evidence of what works through rigorous evaluations, and scale up and disseminate
those strategies that prove successful. This initiative, building on what we’re learning
from the Investing in Innovation program, would prioritize projects that demonstrate the
potential to reduce the net price paid by students, improve learning outcomes, reduce
time to degree, reduce instructional costs and/or improve college completion rates,
especially for high need populations.
The 2012 budget also includes funding for programs like GEAR UP and TRIO, so
States and partnerships can continue providing early college preparation and
awareness activities, as well as completion support, for low-income and first-generation
college students.
And, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act included $2.55 billion
dollars in mandatory funding over 10 years to increase the capacity of minority-serving
institutions to reach more students.
What keeps me up at night is my worries about democracy’s future. The intent of
public higher education has long been to democratize the college degree: providing the
8
full spectrum of working-class Americans with access to a strong, practical, liberal
education. Such access strengthens more than the economy. It strengthens the entire
fabric of our society – locally and globally.
If we fail to provide students with civic knowledge and skills, we risk eroding our
nation’s fundamental values. There’s a link between preserving the ideals we cherish
and producing an educated citizenry able to advocate for these ideals.
So, in rethinking higher education, we must also renew its purpose to enhance
community life, help students fulfill their civic and social responsibilities, and prepare
them to work together to seize the opportunities and solve the problems of our complex
and interconnected world.
A few words about what’s ahead and then we can engage in the Q & A. We have
an ambitious agenda to reform the preparation of our nation’s teachers and learn from
and replicate the results highly effective teachers coming from our best institutions.
We’re also conducting negotiated rulemaking on the student loan program and seeking
stakeholder representatives for both of these processes. We’ve also put a call out for
experiments to increase college completion while capping student loans to reduce
default rates and help students persist to the degree. We’re also going to see whether
Pell grant eligibility will help students complete shorter term training programs leading to
employment.
We have major plans to increase the number of teachers who major in Science,
Technology, Math and Engineering Fields. Overall, our nation will need to recruit and
retain more than a million teachers between now and 2020 and we want at least
100,0000 of those teachers to have graduated in a STEM field with a teaching
credential. But we want more. We want teachers with a passion for education. We
published a new report this fall called “Our Future, Our Teachers” which profiles are
policy goals for teacher preparation and the proposals in the President’s budget for FY
12.
Federal Student Aid is a signature effort for this administration as I highlighted in
my remarks. Over the next six months we will be working with our federal loan servicers
to provide students and families with the opportunity to consolidate their federal loans
into one payment with a lower interest rate, saving – in the aggregate – more than
several billion dollars. We will continue to preserve the Pell grant at $5,550 and take
more steps to increase college access and affordability and reduce college loan default
rates as much as we can.
Strengthening the 1100 community colleges that educate nearly half of our
nations 21 million undergraduates remains a critical priority for the Obama
Administration. With the Department of Labor, we will be issuing the second $500 billion
dollar competitive grant fund for consortia to help community colleges increase quality
and completion. This represents a quarter of the $2 billion dollar fund made possible in
March 2010 when President Obama signed the Health Care and Education
Reconciliation Act with two more competitions in 2013 and 2014.
Our five White House Initiatives are also working together to increase
educational outcomes, especially for students most underrepresented in
American higher education. This slide illustrates a number of policy initiatives affecting
diverse communities and institutions across our nation, including Historically Black
Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving
Institutions, Asian American/Pacific Islander Serving Institutions, and Faith Based and
Neighborhood Partnership efforts underway at hundreds of university and community
college campuses.
9
As you can see, our agenda is acutely focused on increasing access and
affordability, improving quality and increasing completion. It’s difficult and amazing work
and I’d like to thank all of you for contributing all that you can to these efforts that are
absolutely critical to our nation’s future.
Let me close my remarks with a picture of this 7th grader who represents a 2020
graduate and imagine a second picture of her mother who might be getting a college
education today.
As President Obama remarked in describing our mission to prepare higher
education for this new millennium: “A new future filled with possibilities: […] that’s the
promise of an education not just for any one student, but for our entire country. And
that’s why it’s so important that we work together on behalf of […] an education system
that harnesses the talents and hard work of every single American.”
I believe that – together - we will make significant progress toward the 2020 goal
– and the future of America’s universities will be as bright as we expect and need it to
be. If we accomplish this, we will have secured a new future, filled with possibilities, for
our nation. Thank you.
10