Obama Keeps On Promoting Free Community Colleges

As a part of his proposal to make two-year community college tuition-free, President Obama announced the creation of the College Promise Advisory Board during a speech on Wednesday at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich.

The Board led by Chair Dr. Jill Biden and directed by former Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter, will support a free community college education for responsible students.

“Education has always been the secret sauce, the secret to America’s success,” Obama said. “For every young person willing to work hard, I want two years of college to be as free and universal as high school is today […] Having a credential above and beyond your high school diploma, that’s the surest ticket to the middle class.”

Along with the Board, the President promoted “Heads Up America,” an independent campaign to raise the awareness about the importance of America’s community colleges.

Obama also revealed a $175 million in apprenticeship grants by the Department of Labor, which will hire more than 34,000 new apprentices in industries like health care, information technology industries and advanced manufacturing.

According to a White House press release, The American Apprenticeship Grants has added more than 55,000 new apprenticeship opportunities, the largest increase in nearly a decade, since the President’s call to action in his State of the Union 2014.

“I’ve never been more optimistic about America,” Obama said. “We are not there yet. We’ve got more work to do. But if we just keep on building on the progress that we’ve already made, if we keep restoring the link between hard work and success, then we won’t just recover from that recession that we had, we’re going to renew our nation’s promise. We’re going to rebuild our middle class. We’ll remind the world why it is that America is the greatest country on Earth.”

The president got the ball rolling on college cost reformation earlier this year when he announced his $60 billion community college initiative to provide two years of community college for free.

President Obama speaks at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich. Photo credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images