Washington, DC (February 5, 2007) – Today, Congressman Rubén Hinojosa (TX-15) spoke at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities’ annual meeting in Washington D.C. The following are his remarks as prepared for delivery:
Good evening. Thank you for that kind introduction. I am honored to be with you this evening.
As college presidents, you have a great deal of influence. Colleges are extremely important community institutions. They are centers of intellectual activity. They are centers of equity, excellence, and social justice. They are about transforming potential into practice. They are engines for economic growth. As leaders of these institutions, your advocacy carries a lot of weight.
Your institutions make significant contributions to the welfare of your communities. I admire the commitment to access that you demonstrate as individual institutions and as an association.
As just one example, I would like to applaud St. Edward’s University for its longstanding commitment to education the children of migrant farmworkers. I can tell you that there are many distinguished alumni of St. Edwards in my district, and I have even had the privilege of having some of them on my staff.
I also admire that work that NAICU has done as an association. NAICU founded and organized the Student Aid Alliance. That effort is largely responsible for keeping student aid at the top of our education agenda and saved it from the dramatic cuts that were being proposed during the 1994 Contract with America. I would also like to tip my hat to your leadership and your president David Warren. You are well represented here in the capitol.
In light of your historical commitment to student aid and college access, I come to you tonight with an invitation: Work with us in Congress to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. We cannot let this law slip through another Congress. The status quo in higher education is simply inadequate. We need to address access and success in higher education on a much larger scale than we have ever done before, and we need your help and your expertise to take our federal higher education policy to the next level.
I am a firm believer in the power of education. I am a first generation college graduate. My parents fled Mexico in the wake of the revolution and settled in Texas. Despite not having many educational opportunities themselves, my parents put a high premium on education for all of us. When we were languishing in inferior, segregated schools, they picked up and moved the family to a town that would provide better educational opportunities to Mexican children. My parents understood intuitively that education was the path to a better life.
For many in my region, college was not even in the realm of possibility. That was until the GI bill. With GI benefits, colleges had to accept our returning veterans – rich, poor, black, Mexican – they had to take them all. For me, college became possible because these veterans went to college with their GI benefits. Our nation became smarter, stronger and richer as a result of this egalitarian investment in education.
Today, the pay off for investing in education is even greater and the stakes are higher. The global economy rewards those who continually enhance their knowledge and skills and punishes those who do not. Yet, we have not aligned our support for higher education to reflect this reality.
We are shortchanging our next generation of college students. Hispanic and African American students will account for most of the growth in our traditional college aged population. Yet, we know that nationally, only half of these students are graduating from high school on time. Only one in five is college-ready.
Many of our families do not understand financial aid or the college process. A recent survey conducted by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute found that more than half of Hispanic parents and 43 percent of young adults could not name a single source of college financial aid. Certainly, we can do better.
Overcoming these barriers of preparation and financial aid awareness is simply not enough to ensure college success. We know that cost is a major obstacle. The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance estimates that in 2003, more than 400,000 college-qualified low-income students did not enroll in a four-year college, and 170,000 did not enroll in any college at all because of financial barriers.
Moreover, we know that just getting into college is not enough. The benefits of high education come with degree completion. Too many of our students are not making it through. For example only about one-third of students enrolling in community college with the goal of transferring to a bachelor’s degree program ever make the transfer. As private institutions, you have shown a great deal of success in helping your students earn their degrees and graduate on-time. We need your expertise in this area.
The Higher Education Act is our federal commitment to removing these barriers to access and success in higher education. But the federal government cannot do this alone.
This Congress, we have already demonstrated our committed to making college more accessible and more affordable. In our first 100 hours, we passed legislation to cut the interest rate in half on subsidized student loans. In our continuing resolution, we added funds for the first increase in the maximum Pell grant in 4 years – an increase to $4310.
We are only getting started and we need your help to reauthorize the full Higher Education Act. We cannot afford to have the higher education community wait and see if reauthorization will be better than just continuing with the status quo. We can not be afraid to address challenges head on.
In addition to the Higher Education Act, we are going to be looking at the No Child Left Behind Act. As college leaders, we need your help in aligning high school education with college expectations. You cannot sit on the sidelines when it comes to solving the academic preparation piece of the college access puzzle.