Education
is the key to so much we want to achieve as a country: a stronger,
more equitable economy; a healthier, more vibrant democracy; a future in
which we meet challenges with ingenuity and skill. Education is also
the key to our young people achieving their dreams. It’s how we develop
our talents and imagine different futures for ourselves. So any
serious plan for America’s future must include a bold plan to put
quality education – including college – within everyone’s reach, no
matter how much money they have.
College used to be pretty
affordable. For millions of Americans, that’s not the case anymore. Too
many families in the United States are struggling with student debt,
and the problem has reached crisis levels. Within the last ten years, total student debt in our economy has more than doubled and now exceeds $1.2 trillion.
Nearly 7 out of every 10 new graduates of four-year colleges are in
debt, and these indebted graduates carry an average balance of nearly
$30,000. Student debt has surpassed credit card debt, car loan debt, and
home equity lines of credit to be the second largest source of consumer debt.
And this is not just an issue for borrowers: It is holding our economy back.
This debt prevents people from forming families, buying homes, and
starting small businesses. It sends the wrong signal to future students
whom we need to complete college to drive economic growth.
Meanwhile,
for families sending their kids to colleges and universities, tuition
has ballooned out of control and has become increasingly unaffordable
even at public colleges and universities. Tuition has risen 40% in the last ten years at four-year public colleges and universities,
after inflation, while family incomes have remained basically flat.
And states have been cutting their spending on higher education – by
roughly 20% per student since the recession – rather than expanding
their investments.
Simply put, this situation has careened out of
control. Hillary Clinton has a plan to help millions of Americans with
their debt right now, and a plan to make college debt-free for future
generations. Provide Immediate Help to Graduates Who Need Relief from Crushing Debt Hillary has made clear she will fight to ensure that all borrowers can:
Refinance their student loans at current rates, just as borrowers can refinance a car or home loan. Refinancing would help 25 million borrowers across the country, with the typical borrower saving $2,000 over the life of the loan.
Enroll in income-based repayment. Nobody should have to pay more than 10 percent of monthly income, and college debt should be forgiven after 20 years –
and 10 years if a borrower works in the public interest. Hillary will
simplify, expand and develop options for automatic enrollment in these
programs.
Push employers to contribute to student debt relief.Employers
must be part of the solution to the student debt crisis. Clinton will
create a payroll deduction portal for employers and employees that will
simplify the repayment process. She will explore further options to
encourage employers to help pay down student debt.
Get relief from debt for starting a business or social enterprise. Aspiring entrepreneurs will be able to defer their loans with no payments or interest for up to three years so
that student debt and the lack of family wealth is not a barrier to
innovation in our country. For social entrepreneurs and those starting
new enterprises in distressed communities, her plan will provide up to
$17,500 in loan forgiveness.
Reward public service. AmeriCorps
members who complete two years of national service and a year of public
service can have their loans forgiven. Teachers who teach in high-need
areas or in subjects with teacher shortages – such as computer science
or special education – will get enhanced loan forgiveness.
A Moratorium on Student Debt to Get Millions of Borrowers Relief from Crushing Debt: Today, Hillary Clinton is announcing that she will take immediate executive action to offer a three-month moratorium on student loan payments to
all federal loan borrowers. During this time-out from paying student
loans, every borrower will be given the resources and targeted help they
need to save money on their loans. With dedicated assistance
from the Department of Education during this moratorium, borrowers will
be able to consolidate their loans, sign up quickly and easily for
income-based repayment plans, and take direct advantage of opportunities
to reduce monthly interest payments and fees. Borrowers who are
delinquent or in default will receive additional rehabilitation options
to help them get back on their feet. Clinton will also use the
moratorium to crack down on for-profit colleges and loan servicers who
have too often taken advantage of borrowers – and to ensure that
borrowers can resolve outstanding issues in a timely and fair manner.
Debt-Free College for our Future Students
Hillary
Clinton has pledged to achieve the goal of debt-free college for future
graduates, so that cost is never a barrier for young people seeking to
pursue their dreams of higher education. It’s a simple, but bold idea: Every student should be able to graduate from a public college or university in their state without taking on any student debt. To reach this goal, Hillary is enhancing the New College Compact she announced last year. Her plan will:
Eliminate college tuition for working families. Families with income up to $125,000 will pay no tuition at
in-state public colleges and universities – covering more than 80
percent of all families. From the start of this plan, every student from
a family making $85,000 a year or less will be able to go to a 4-year
public college or university tuition free. This income threshold will
increase by $10,000 a year every year over the next four years so that
by 2021, all students with a family income of $125,000 will have the
opportunity to pay no tuition. She will also continue her commitment to
ensure that community colleges are tuition-free for all working
families.
Help students deal with all of the costs of attending college.
Hillary Clinton will protect Pell Grant funding to help low- and
middle-income students pay non-tuition expenses, and she will restore year-round Pell Grant funding so
that students have the necessary support they need to take summer
classes and meet their goal of completing college. She will make a major investment in HBCUs, Minority-Serving Institutions and
other low-cost, modest-endowment private schools so that these
deserving students also benefit from the lower cost of college. She will
work to expand opportunities for students to earn money for
expenses through term-time work and to receive college credit for
national service. She will expand support for student-parents, including
a fifteen-fold increase in federal funding for on-campus child care.
The New College Compact: Hillary Clinton’s plan requires everyone to do their part.
The federal government will make a major new investment to make this
possible, but states will have to step up and meet their obligations as
well.
States will have to commit to a combination of reinvestment
and reform over the next four years and beyond to ensure that federal
support is funding students and not excessive cost growth.
Colleges
and universities will be accountable for reining in costs to provide
value to their students; improving completion rates and learning
outcomes; and doing more to provide students from disadvantaged
backgrounds with the tools they need to reach college and succeed once
they get there.
Students will be expected to work 10
hours a week to help defray the full cost of attendance. Clinton will
push to expand work opportunities that build career skills and introduce
students of all backgrounds to public service careers.
As
part of this New College Compact, Hillary will encourage and reward
innovators who design imaginative new ways of providing valuable higher
education to students while driving down costs. And she will crack down
on the abusive practices of for-profit colleges that defraud taxpayers
while burdening students with debt for educational programs of no value.
Remarks at USAID's Higher Education Solutions Network Event
Remarks
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
Rajiv Shah
USAID Administrator
Benjamin Franklin Room
Washington, DC
November 8, 2012
ADMINISTRATOR SHAH:
Well, I will be very brief. My name is Raj Shah. I’m the Administrator
at USAID. We want to thank all of our colleagues from universities, from
the Department of State, and from across our government.
And I’ll
get a chance to make a few remarks after Secretary Clinton departs this
afternoon, but we are – I am so honored to be able to host you here in
this room. It is a special room with a lot of significance, but in this
case, the significance is Secretary Clinton has been a tremendous
proponent not just of development and of tackling extreme poverty around
the world, but of bringing American science, technology, innovation,
and youthful enterprise to that task. And one of the ways we have tried
to put into practice that guidance and theme has been creating and
launching the development laboratories on college campuses that we’re
inaugurating here today and in the conference series tomorrow.
So I
do want to take just one moment to thank Megan Smith from Google who’s
on our advisory board and has been from the beginning, Rick Klausner for
helping us to conceptualize this, and [inaudible], who has also served
in that capacity.
So with that, Madam Secretary, thank you for having us here today. SECRETARY CLINTON:
Thank you so much, Raj, and it’s exciting for me to welcome all of you
here to the State Department, actually to the Benjamin Franklin Room.
Mr. Franklin is above us over the fireplace. But what a especially
fitting setting for us to be discussing this exciting new initiative,
harnessing science and technology to save and improve millions of lives
around the world.
Raj just finished thanking a lot of people, but I
want to thank you, Raj, for your leadership and your commitment to
innovation that produces results. And it’s been a very exciting time to
try to reach out and create a network of likeminded partners and
institutions to work with USAID. And I am delighted to see all of you
here.
Having representatives of these seven universities focusing
the ingenuity of your brightest people on these daunting challenges is
very reassuring to us because we know we cannot do the work we try to do
solely on the – building on the past, looking at what might have worked
10 years ago or 20 years ago. Nobody does that in the private sector,
and it’s perhaps slightly more difficult to change direction in the
public sector, but we know we must, and this is a very strong indicator
of that.
I know we have some students with us today and we thank
them for being part of this. I think it’s exciting that you will have a
chance to really be part of solving some of these difficult problems we
face. What we’ve tried to do in the Obama Administration is to elevate
development alongside diplomacy and defense, because we consider the
so-called three “D”s as being the basis, the foundation, of our foreign
policy and national security. And we’ve also tried to put real substance
behind the slogan “Country-led, Country-owned.” Our goal is to help
countries become self-sufficient, to be in the hoped-for future
themselves, putting us out of business because of the way that we are
working together now.
So we cannot rely solely on traditional
development – building roads, infrastructure, hospitals, training,
doctors, nurses, teachers. Incremental change is a necessary but not
sufficient pathway to what we hope to accomplish. And that’s why Raj and
his team have put a special focus on science and technology, and we’ve
already seen some serious steps forward because of that. We’ve kicked
off a series of prizes, challenges, and competitions. USAID launched
three grand challenges for development – to save lives at birth, get all
children reading, and power agriculture through clean energy. We’ve
also created new funding mechanisms that will help bring new ideas to
scale like our Development Innovation Ventures program, which is
supporting new solutions to prevent electoral fraud and to expand access
to credit for underserved populations.
We’re helping build
research capacity through new partnerships with the National Science
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health that connect American
scientists with their counterparts around the world. And through science
fellowships, we’re bringing in more researchers, engineers, and
physicians to work with USAID.
Now we want to build on and expand
all this progress, and we especially want to expand our portfolio of
partners in the private sector, in local NGOs, and of course in the
academic and research community, and that’s where all of you come in.
Each of the seven universities represented here today has committed to
create a development lab. Working with USAID’s field mission experts and
Washington staff, scientists and researchers in these labs will apply
the latest science and technology to some of the biggest challenges in
development.
For example, MIT, a leader in design and technology,
will publish reports on the effectiveness of different technologies
ranging from treadle pumps to microscopes mounted on cell phones. Think
of it as a kind of consumers report for development. Berkeley and MIT
are creating a new discipline of development science and engineering.
That will mean new courses, new journals, new departments, and even new
PhDs dedicated to design for low and middle-income countries. And
Makerere, a university in Uganda, will engage the developing world by
creating online courses with a special focus on people helping
themselves to get an education as well as fighting for more
transparency, accountability, justice and equality in their own
societies.
At Texas A&M, researchers will bring a special
focus on improving agricultural productivity. William & Mary will
help USAID advance its use of data and analytics to improve
decision-making. Scientists at Michigan State will study megatrends like
population growth and climate change. In many parts of the world, as
you know so well, rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall
patterns are making it harder for farmers to grow enough food, putting a
strain on entire agricultural systems. Now of course, climate change is
not a problem that only hurts people in faraway places. It affects
everyone, and we are seeing the effects, as we speak, in our own
country. And I think it’s increasingly imperative that we address that
issue at every level of society.
So the idea behind the Higher
Education Solutions Network that we are launching today is to take
advantage of each lab’s unique abilities. Here’s an example of how it
could work: An entrepreneur at Berkeley discovers a groundbreaking
innovation to bring clean drinking water to low-income families, but she
needs to take it to scale. So the network connects her to researchers
at Duke who have expertise in accelerating and scaling up solutions, and
together, they grow her business so her work benefits hundreds of
thousands, even millions of people.
I’m very excited about this
project and pleased to announce that USAID has committed up to $130
million for the network and development labs over the next five years.
This commitment will be matched by an equivalent amount from
universities and their partners. But to make this network a reality, we
need your input and ideas. So in the rest of this session, which Raj
will chair, I hope you’ll explore how we can work together to make what
we’re doing as effective as possible as soon as possible. How can we
ensure that this is not just a series of individual grants or one-off
accomplishments, but instead we create an integrated network that
delivers large scale impact?
So I’m very excited about this. I’m
sorry I can’t stay for the discussion. I have to go over to the White
House. Now that the election is over, we’re trying to – (laughter) –
make up for a lot of lost time in dealing with a lot of the issues that
are pressing for our country and the world. But Raj will give me a full
de-brief.
But again, I want to thank all the universities. We’re
especially pleased to have you come from Uganda. Eventually, our dream
would be that this would be a global network, and that development labs
would be working around the world, all networked and creating very
positive outcomes for millions and millions of people who might never
hear of what we are doing, but would see the results of all of your
work.
Thank you very much. Thanks, Raj. (Applause.)
