I took part in a conference call yesterday with President Bill Clinton, who was promoting the upcoming meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University, a program he founded in 2007 to encourage college students to become community leaders. This year, the initiative’s fourth annual meeting is taking place at the University of California, San Diego, where 1,100 students from 50 states and 90 countries gathered today. Students will be tackling an ambitious agenda which includes sessions on financial aid and college affordability, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and poverty along the U.S.-Mexico border.
I’ve written a number of stories recently that deal with the rising cost of a college education, so I was interested to hear President Clinton’s perspective on the topic. I asked him why college affordability was on the agenda for the meeting and what he thinks can be done to make college more accessible for Americans.
Clinton told me he was concerned that though the U.S. still leads the world in the percentage of people going to college, the country has fallen from first to twelfth among developed nations in the percentage of young adults who are college graduates. “This is a disaster,” he said. “We have to do something about it and we need to focus on the affordability component.”
Another area of concern for Clinton is swelling tuition and fees. After inflation, college costs have increased by 75 percent in the last decade, he noted. “That’s just not a sustainable situation,” he said.
Read the full article: Clinton Tackles College Affordability
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