Bill Clinton: “I have tried to do two things on the vocational education issue, generally. One is, along with all the other education…”

“I have tried to do two things on the vocational education issue, generally. One is, along with all the other education programs, to argue that we ought to look at our situation in America as having both a budget deficit and an educational deficit. If you look at--there's a bigger difference in the incomes of people by virtue of how much education they have in this country than ever before, the biggest difference ever since we've been keeping these statistics. And it's because more and more people's incomes, not just farmers but other people's incomes, are now set in a global economy, which means that you have to address the education deficit as well as the budget deficit. And that means that there has to be an appropriate level of investment for things that we want to produce. If you look at vocational training generally, one of the things that I'm proudest of that our administration has done is that we have worked very hard to help every State that wanted to participate set up a system of moving young people from high schools who don't go to 4-year institutions--may go to community colleges or vocational schools but don't go to 4-year institutions--into an educational program that would also be a vocational program where they would be working and learning at the same time. And I believe very strongly that we have to abolish what I think is an artificial distinction between academic education and vocational education. For a long time, people kind of put down vocational education. But if you look at it, there's now a lot of evidence that a lot of people learn better when they're doing, plus which a lot of these vocational programs, including agriculture, now require higher levels of knowledge of computers, for example, than a lot of traditional academic courses do. So I think we have an idea battle we have to fight, which is to raise the status of vocational education generally and abolish, just erase, the line between what's vocational and academic; and secondly, to keep our levels of investment in all kinds of education that we need for the future high enough to raise incomes. The biggest problem in America today, economic problem, is that more than half the people are working harder than they were 15 years ago for the same or lower incomes, not just farmers, wage-earning, hourly wage- earning Americans. That is the biggest problem we've got. The American dream requires a growing middle class and a shrinking under class, and requires a system--and I think the principal role of Government today in the economy should be to help people help themselves. And if you've got people who are out there working hard and they're productive, or they're prepared to be, that's what I think we ought to be doing. The Government--we don't have the money or the independence from other countries to do what we did in the Great Depression, just to try to create jobs for everybody and do those kind of things. We don't have the money or the position in the world economy. But we do have the capacity to help our people help themselves. And I think we ought to be doing more of it, not less of it. And I think you can do that. If you look at what a small percentage of the Federal budget this is, it is wrong to say that you cannot do that and drastically reduce this deficit, move it into balance. [Senator Baucus thanked the President and suggested continuing the discussion over lunch.]”