Obama wooing young voters with student loan focus

JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press

Sunday, April 22, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eager to energize young voters, President Barack Obama is depicting Republicans as obstacles to an affordable college education as he previews an argument he will make on university campuses next week in states crucial to his re-election.

"This is a question of values," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday. "We cannot let America become a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of people struggle to get by."

Obama wants Congress to extend a law that cut interest rates on a popular federal loan program for low- and middle-income undergraduates. If the law expires, the rates will double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.

Obama blames Republicans for voting against new ways to make college more affordable for middle-class families. But it was House Democrats who cut interest rates on the school loans in 2007 and included an expiration provision that placed the looming increase in the middle of an election year.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday that more than 7 million students would be financially squeezed if rates were to rise, to the cost of an additional $1,000 on average.

Obama is visiting to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Colorado at Boulder on Tuesday and the University of Iowa on Wednesday. The three schools are in states Obama won in 2008 but are in play this year in his race against the likely Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

"In America, higher education cannot be a luxury," Obama said. "It's an economic imperative that every family must be able to afford."

He argued that at a time of high joblessness, the rate of unemployment for Americans with a college degree is about half the national average. "It's never been more important," he said.

The courting of young voters will include an appearance on NBC's "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" show, which will be taped while Obama is in North Carolina.

While Obama addressed education as his newest election-year theme, Republicans stuck to their criticism of Obama's energy policies. Citing still high gasoline prices, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri said Obama is focusing on the wrong issues.

Blunt chided Obama and Senate Democrats in the GOP's weekend address for pushing unsuccessfully for a tax increase on millionaires instead of focusing on consumer pain at the pump. He pressed Obama to drop his opposition to the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, which the president blocked earlier this year. The administration says it is waiting for the pipeline developer, TransCanada, to submit a new route that avoids environmentally sensitive lands. The company unveiled a preferred route on Thursday.

"The Keystone pipeline is one common-sense step in the right direction to help put more people back to work, reduce prices at the pump and position our nation for greater energy security now and in the future," Blunt said.

Online:

Obama address: www.whitehouse.gov

GOP address: www.youtube.com/gopweeklyaddress

More like this story

JCLifer 1 year, 1 month ago

Socialism.

Sequoia 1 year, 1 month ago

Grace, this makes no sense. The reason higher education is costing more is because government funding is less. I mean, where do you think PUBLIC universities get all their money?

One of the best things this country did was allow millions of people to go to college debt free on the GI Bill. Without crushing debt, those people went on to create a middle class that made this country great. They made things happen, grew industry, and they could raise good families because they weren't crushed with debt.

Those freeloaders! What a socialist dystopia this country was in the 1950s!

Seriously, you people complaining about socialism have no grasp of our history. You amaze me.

dokeus6 1 year, 1 month ago

Whoa!! Watch out Sequoia.!! Don't question Graceful. In her world, things don't react well to others' opinions.

JCLifer 1 year, 1 month ago

And Obama and Arne Duncan want every kid to go to college so they can be "successful". What a bunch of bull! Kids need better vocational education. They need solid skills employers need.

I would rather my kid took a welding class than some crazy Calculus or Eastern European Literature class that she will never use. Having a marketable skill will be a whole lot more useful than all these dance, band, art, or sports classes they have at the high schools.

asb 1 year, 1 month ago

Have her get an engineering degree, civil, electrical, aeronautical, and particularly petroleum (the oil companies are hiring ungraduated engineers at $60K to $80K). Pays a lot better than welding and there are many positions awaiting her.

Sequoia 1 year, 1 month ago

Obama supported vocational education in that speech, too. Now that Santorum is out, you don't have to parrot him. No reason for that swipe, eh?

I agree kids need more useful, hands-on classes. But they need literature and math so they can learn how to read and think for themselves. If you're stupid, shallow and ignorant of the wide world, knowing how to weld won't make your life any better.

This whole thing about ripping on music, art, literature and calculus because you don't "use" them is so, so shallow and harmful to kids, and it really burns me up. The structure of a great poem or dance is just as beautiful as the structure of a building or a computer. God is found in both brush strokes and circuit boards. Those classes are about developing your mind, expanding your ability to think and problem-solve, teach you how to be a good, active person, think about things from others' points of view, and think for yourself. Ripping on those classes seems like such a low, mechanistic view of learning and of the mind. What a small, timid life we'd have without art, music, math and literature!

In a country where manufacturing is gone for good and we're in desperate need of a NEW industrial revolution, those thinking skills will become just as important, if not more so, than learning how to weld.

asb 1 year ago

Extremely well said. However, you're arguing with people who eat or burn books.

JCLifer 1 year ago

No, he is arguing with people who work for a living and are sick and tired of paying for 7 million people on welfare to lay around and make babies instead of trying to get some skills and get a job so they can support themselves and the 699,999,999 others still on welfare.

Poetry, Fashion, Literature, Art, Band, Philosophy, etc. are fine for rich people to send their daughters to foo-foo private schools to study as they look for a man to support them. However, someone has to engineer, make, and fix all the stuff that people use everyday. Fiddle while the country burns, just don't expect me to pay for your fiddle or the fiddle lessons.

Go ahead and poke fun at me and say i am ignorant, etc. This country is LOSING, and it will soon be a matter of time before we are slaves to other countries. I guess what our forefathers fought and died for means nothing to you, but to me it is very precious.

Hopefully I will be dead in a few years, so I won't have to put up with the carnage the liberals have wreaked on this country much longer. I hope you are happy working for peanuts at the foriegn-owned coffee shop with your Masters degrees and all your student loans.

Sequoia 1 year ago

Look Lifer, I work just as hard as you do, but look at the statistics. Most of your tax money is not going to welfare. It is going to health care and defense. What does that have to do with studying humanities anyway? You do realize under-employed baristas don't qualify for welfare, right? Spare me the self-rightous whine about your work ethic and our forefathers. Okay, fine. I'm SURE you love this country more than me. Sheesh.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be engineers. I'm saying engineers should have to read poetry or learn the trumpet while they're in school. It will make them better engineers.

Sequoia 1 year ago

I've been reading this pretty great book about North Korea, "The Orphan Master's Son," and something about this discussion reminds me of that.

In North Korea, you are given an education to serve the state. If officials identify a particular aptitute in you, say for singing or math or soldiering, you are forced to study that, and only that, for the productive glory of the state. The North Koreans specifically frown on the idea of diverse education and well-rounded citizens, and self-direction in general. The only "literature" you can get there is one book, written by the Leader. That's it. The message is about subjecting yourself to the needs of the state. Your identity is "the worker." That's who you are.

In the authoritarian mind, the workers concern themselves only with the practical: Production. Tons. Acres. Units. More. In the authoritarian mind, the Leader tells the only story. You don't get to know any stories. The only story that is possible in the authoritarian mind is the story that the Leader tells.

You don't get to know the possibilities. There is only one story. The Leader tells the story. You are told the story. That story is your life.

One of these great gifts our forefathers gave us was the right to read all the world's stories for ourselves, and to write our own story for ourselves. You want to talk about slaves? Talk to someone who only knows one story.

spelchek 1 year ago

"...you're arguing with people who eat or burn books." -- Likewise. Didn't I read about an OWS loser defecating on a police car? Didn't a constitutional scholar democrat president sign a potentially unconstitutional law? Yeah, you progressives are a real class act.

asb 1 year ago

I don't poop on police cars, and one fool doing so doesn't a movement make (sorry. . .). Without being more specific, which president signed a law that was overturned, may yet be overturned, or could someday be overturned by the SCOTUS?

asb 1 year ago

If America goes ddown, making Grace happy no doubt, it'll be the forced teaching of superstition as science and the making of controversy out of established science. To very briefly paraphrase Neil Degrasse Tyson, "Force what your church teaches as gospel into my science classroom and you've got a fight." The lack of that attitude by teachers is what's wrong with our education; teachers afraid to teach because of the burning pits being set up all over the US.

JCLifer 1 year ago

Obama talked about vocational education at community colleges, but he and his sdministration are not supportive of vocational education in high school. They want all kids to take a college prep curriculum so they can all go to college and get a degree to be successful. Get rid of vocational education out of the high schools and watch the dropout rates skyrocket. Arnie Duncan destroyed Chicago's schools and now he wants to destroy the rest of the schools At

kentheco 1 year, 1 month ago

Okay, here’s another way for him to get the young vote. Pay for their college and then give them welfare when they can't/won't find jobs. Do you think he'll throw in party money too!

viktorkowski 1 year ago

well here is something I should stay out of because I had the good fortune of having my college education paid for by Denmark as my mother was danish. But I did have the misfortune of having to pay off my wife's college debt. If I hadn't it would of taken her 20 years to pay it off. it seems to me that in the united states the cost of college education has went the way of the cost of medical care. greatly over-valued

wyriontair 1 year ago

Here's a novel idea, take and pay for classes as you go along, instead of spending thousands of dollars a year on classes that are not relevant to their goals. Maybe we should also cut the outrageous amount of money to chancellors and professors for their salaries and perks, get rid of some of the ridiculous courses that are offered. We paid for our classes one or two at a time and only took the classes that met our criteria to obtain our goals and we worked full time and some overtime to get it done. Of course the president is once again wooing students, it's called buying votes or quid pro quo-you give me your vote and I'll pay for your school. I remember that in 2008 a student at WWU said in an interview, she would vote for him because he wanted to give them health care, it was curious that the journalist didn't ask the question, "weren't you going to get a job and get insurance on your own?" That would have been a great question, but over the past decade, I've noticed that there are very few real journalists.

kentheco 1 year ago

Can you say, "buy the low-income, middle-income vote"? It was the democrats that set it to end during the election year, now Obama, if it is extended, can claim credit. Sort of like the democratic rhetoric of "if you vote for a republican, they'll cut your welfare". How about using funds brought in by sports programs to help offset tuition increases? Alternatively, cut the salaries of the coaches and their staffs to below the lowest paid professor and give all endorsement income to the school, not the coach. Make student athletes take classes, and prove that they’ve actually learned a skill, for a career after their time is sports is finished. In an article that appeared in the January 2006 USA Today, most athletes don’t learn enough in college to manage their lives after their careers are done? “In fact, 78% of all NFL players are divorced, bankrupt, or unemployed two years after leaving the game, according to Ken Ruettgers, a former player and current advocate for NFL players transitioning from professional sports.” Why not re-think the way student loans are handled. Make it so that once an individual graduates and becomes productive, the government pays off the loans. That way, those who strive to succeed, benefit from the limited resources and those who want to party, have to pay for it and not the taxpayers.

Frankenstein27 1 year ago

The GI Bill wasn't done to reward service members, it was done to keep down unemployement. That's also the reason for expansion of the availability of student loans in the 90's. Look at the growth of administration and "research" on college campuses since the 80's. Also, look at the expansion of college campuses themselves.
College isn't for the 1%'s and it shouldn't be, but making sure everyone has a degree doesn't make any sense. You shouldn't need a college degree to wait tables or answer phones, but many businesses now require them, because such a huge percentage of folks applying for those positions have them. That's just silly.

Any presiding administration wants to keep people in school for as long as possible to pad unemployment statistics. Student loans are the way to do that. Whether a kid is at a legitimate school learning skills to better themselves and the world, or whether they're attending a diploma bill to get a useless slip of paper, that kid isn't "unemployed."

And yes, funneling money into education raises its cost. For-profit schools are a byproduct of federal student loans. Even at public schools, excessive facilities and administration are a byproduct of student loans.

spelchek 1 year ago

The divider in chief divides again!!!! High ho Obama, away!!!!!!

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