President Barack Obama emphasized Monday his goal of ensuring student borrowers they will only have to repay 10 percent of their salary per payback installment.
Obama spoke via conference call with The Daily Reveille and several other collegiate newspapers from around the nation about his priorities for higher education.
He stressed making college more affordable for the average American student, especially by lowering maximum loan payback installments.
“Our second priority is making sure that higher education creates a workforce that’s ready for the new jobs of the future,” Obama said.
The third part of the higher education strategy is making sure more students complete college, Obama said.
“The key here is that we want to open the doors of our colleges and universities to more people so they can learn, they can graduate and they can succeed in life,” Obama said.
“Our classrooms, our professors, our administrators, our students — you guys are going to drive future success of the United States,” he said.
Obama took questions from four student journalists from around the country, ranging from Penn State University to the University of California at Los Angeles.
“I’ve been talking about this a lot lately. We have fallen behind,” Obama said. “In a single generation we have fallen from first to 12th in college graduation rates for young adults.”
With massive state deficit increasing the likelihood of cuts to higher education, states need to take in more tax revenue in order to prevent passing on increased costs to students, Obama said.
He said education is the only system with higher inflation than health care, but some of this inflation is out of the control of university administrators.
When he goes to public colleges and universities and sees some of the athletic facilities and food courts, he said they’re nicer than when he went to college.
“You’ve got to think about what we can do to generally make universities more cost effective for students,” Obama said. “You should know where your tuition is going.”
Obama urged universities to remind faculty members that their “primary job is to teach.”
“If we’re serious about building a stronger economy and making sure we succeed in the 21st century, then the single most important step we can take is to make sure that every young person gets the best education possible,” he said.
 
 
 
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Contact Parker Cramer at [email protected]