President Barack Obama delivers remarks on college affordability while speaking at the football practice field at the University of Michigan's Al Glick Field House in Ann Arbor, Mich., Jan. 27, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
In the State of the Union, President Obama made a point to talk about two critically important trends when it comes to education.
First, if you look at unemployment rates broken down by education level, you’ll notice something stark: Those without a college diploma are twice as likely to be without a job as those who earned a bachelor’s degree. For those who finished college or received more education still, the unemployment rate is just 4.1 percent—less than half the national average. And even among the employed, those who finished college make twice as much as those who failed to finish high school.
But even as a college degree has become more important than ever, the cost of that diploma has [begun to]skyrocketed. For the first time, Americans owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards. A senior in high school today has seen the cost of full-timeattendance at a public university nearly double in her lifetime.
This morning at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the President outlined a Blueprint for making college more affordable.
