Bill Clinton: “Thank you. It's good to see you. How many of you are students here? Okay. And how many of you are in the Delta Service…”

“Thank you. It's good to see you. How many of you are students here? Okay. And how many of you are in the Delta Service Corps? And then, who's here from Teach For America? That's good. I've got it. Let me, first of all, say how delighted I am to be here and how much I appreciate all of you taking a little time out to talk with me. You probably know that I am going from here over to the University of New Orleans to speak about the national service plan and the new direct loan plan for college students that will be announced today and will be introduced shortly into the Congress. I have with me today Senator Johnston and many Members of your congressional delegation and your Lieutenant Governor and many State officials here and some people who have come all the way from Washington to be with us, the Secretary of Education and Gen. David Jones, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a lot of people who believe in you and your future and all the other young people in this country. What I wanted to do today is to try to sort of set the stage for this speech that I'm going to go give and also to listen to you a little bit about the kinds of things that you do now: Why did you get into this service? Do you believe if there were more opportunities, more young people would do it? This program we're going to propose will provide opportunities for tens of thousands of young people to work before, during, or after college to build up credit against a college education or, if they do it afterward, to pay off their college loans. It will also change the way young people borrow money to go to college so that you won't have to pay money back that you can't afford to pay back. Even if you borrow a lot of money to go to college, you'll always pay it back as a percentage of your income, so that people will be able to, and if you're not working, you don't have to pay it back. Then you pay it back as you work. But we're going to use the tax system and make sure that you have to pay it back if you can, so there won't be all the defaults we have now. That will lower the cost of and the threshold of going to college for every young person in America who wants to deal with it. So I want to increase access to college, but also it's very important for me to increase the number of people, starting in our high schools, who will engage in some form of service. So I think it would be helpful to me to know--we can maybe start with the high school students. If you could talk a little bit about the service projects you've been involved in and why you do it and whether you think we can get a lot more people involved. Who wants to go first? [At this point, a student discussed her experience as a volunteer with the Girl Scouts of America and the importance of being a role model.]”