Obama Calls for College Affordability, Limits on Education and Research Funding Cuts
February 13, 2013
The president suggests that protecting defense spending by making deeper cuts to education is worse than sequestration.
President Obama addressed the nation on Tuesday for the first State of the Union of his second term. The higher education section of the speech focused on college affordability and limiting cuts to education and research programs.
For the second year in a row, Obama warned colleges to control rising costs or lost federal money. “Taxpayers can’t keep subsidizing higher and higher and higher costs for higher education,” he remarked.
“Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure that they do.” The president said, urging Congress “to change the Higher Education Act so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid.”
Obama announced that his administration would release on Wednesday “a new ‘College Scorecard’ that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criterion”where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.”
The president’s address comes weeks before the March 1 sequestration deadline. Unless Congress acts to avert the mandatory across-the-board budget cuts, spending on defense and domestic programs will be slashed by 5 percent. Obama used the speech as an opportunity to push for continued funding on federal research and education programs.
“Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation,” he said. “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race.”
President Obama also called for comprehensive immigration reform, though he did not specifically mention the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. The president previously issued his support for a Senate plan that would ease the path to citizenship for undocumented students and would allow some foreign graduates of American universities to remain in the country to work.
The Republican rebuttal to the president’s remarks, delivered by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, proposed a plan for “strengthening and modernizing” the federal student aid system to allow more money to flow to online programs and competency-based courses.
“We need student aid that does not discriminate against programs that nontraditional students rely on,” he said.
Rubio, mentioning his own six-figure student debt, called for expanding disclosures around students’ loan and salary information. “We must give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out,” he stated.
Related Links:
Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address
Senator Rubio’s Republican Address to the Nation
Michelle Cormier Mott
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