Thursday, March 15, 2012
Floor Speech: Introducing the American Dream Accounts Act of 2012
Mr. President, parents in my home state of Delaware and all across this country worry so much and work so hard for the future of their children – for their health, their safety, their education and their future.
I rise today as a parent of three young children and the son and grandson of classroom teachers to talk about how we can pull together to provide all the tools and resources that parents, teachers, mentors and students need to understand, to afford and to connect with college opportunities in this country.
Why do we need a new solution to this long standing problem of college access? Well let’s just look at some statistics from this recent, tough recession we’re still growing our way out of.
The unemployment rate amongst high school drop-outs was 13%, amongst those who had finished high school 8% and amongst those with a college degree just 4%. That’s an enormous difference, that’s millions of people unemployed because they didn’t finish their high school education and go on to some higher education.
In the new global economy, Americans who do not go on after high school have a million dollars less in lifetime earning potential compared to those who do go to college. That million dollar difference is something which if parents and teachers and students were aware of at the beginning of their education, it might drive them to make very different choices.
And as a Senator, I’ve met with dozens of folks who lead companies, who are innovators and job creators who’ve said they have vacant positions they can’t fill because we’re not graduating enough Americans with advanced degrees and training in critical opportunities – engineering, science, technology and math.
So I think filling the gap of opportunity by connecting students, teachers, parents and mentors and creating a new generation of higher education achievers is something we can and should do to help create a competitive economy and workforce for the future.
That’s why, today, I am introducing the American Dream Accounts Act of 2012. Mr. President, this legislation encourages partnerships between schools, colleges, local non-profits and businesses to develop secure, Web-based individual, portable student accounts that contain information about each student’s academic preparedness, financial literacy, connects them to high-impact mentoring and is tied to a college savings account.
Instead of having each of these difference resources available separately, it connects them, across existing silos and across existing education programs at the state and federal level. And by connecting across these different silos, it deploys a powerful new tool and resource for students, parents, teachers and mentors.
This bill is a modest, but I think powerful, step toward helping more students of all income levels and backgrounds access, afford and complete a college education.
And I’m grateful to Senator Rubio of Florida and Senator Bingaman of New Mexico for joining me as original co-sponsors of this innovative solution.
Mr. President, too many American kids today are cut off from the enormous potential and value of higher education. Today, just about 1 out of 10 children from low-income families will complete a college degree by the time they are 24. And as I’ve already said, the economic consequences of that are one of the main drivers of unemployment and poverty in our modern economy.
But with early action, with early engagement, we can help millions of Americans beat those odds.
Many years ago, early in my career, I had the opportunity to work with something called the national “I Have a Dream” Foundation, founded by Gene Lang, through which my family and I adopted a whole class of elementary school kids from the east side of Wilmington. And all over this country, more than 100 similar groups of motivated individuals and donors have engaged in sponsoring college education opportunities for kids beginning at a very early age.
What I saw first-hand in the dozen years I was actively engaged with the 50 kids in our “I Have a Dream” program, was that young people who come from a community, a family, a school where there is little to no experience of college education get powerful and negative messages from an early age that college is not for them. That it’s not affordable, that it’s not accessible, that it’s not part of the plan for their future.
Similarly, kids who grow up in families where their parents went to school, their teachers went to school – went to college – get constant messages, subtle but powerful messages, about the value and importance of college. Folks who come from those backgrounds hear, whether its college sports, pride in their own graduation, or constant conversations about one’s alma mater, or visits to college campuses, from childhood they hear about college as something that’s just an expected part of life.
Very few of the 50 "Dreamers" my family and I worked with had any expectation of a college education. And the most powerful thing we did was to change that – to open the door to college as possibility from elementary school on.
It showed, and this program has showed, time and time again across the country, that exciting and engaging not just young students but their parents, their teachers and an array of mentors has cumulative, powerful, positive impact.
The American Dream Accounts Act will expand on this idea, and use modern social networking technology to bring together existing programs and deliver ideas that will work for more kids.
And the good news is, by utilizing existing Department of Education funds, this legislation comes at no additional cost to taxpayers
What makes the American Dream Accounts work is their unique ability to harness the power of currently available technology to address some of the biggest challenges in college access.
First, connectivity. The journey from elementary school to finishing high school is long, and the journey from there to higher education is a longer one. So many students in our public schools all over this country disengage or even drop out along the way because they are not connected. They attend large and sometimes anonymous schools. Their parents are stretched too thin in this tough economy, trying to hang on to their jobs and their housing. And frankly, a dedicated cadre of teachers can only do so much.
And these kids, as they become less and less connected to a clear vision of their future, drop out or make choices that make it unlikely they’ll finish high school and go on to college.
American Dream Accounts take advantage of modern technology. They are a Facebook-inspired opportunity to deliver secure, personalized hubs of information that would connect these kids, sustain and support them throughout the entire journey of education.
Second, it connects them with college savings opportunities. Senator Roth of Delaware long served as Chairman of the Finance Committee, and one of the greatest pieces of his legacy is the Roth IRA, helping empower working families to save for retirement. Part of the American Dream Accounts is the idea of connecting young people to college savings accounts. Virtually every state, Mr. President, has college savings programs, yet they’re not accessed by most of the working and middle class of America.
Connecting students to college savings accounts from their earliest age has powerful impact. Studies show that students who know there is a dedicated college savings account in their name are seven times more likely to go to college than their peers without one.
So this legislation would help open an individual savings account for each enrolled student from the beginning of elementary school. It matters less how much money is in the account than that students are aware there is one.
The third piece of this program is early intervention. State and federal governments already spend billions of dollars, Mr. President on higher education – on Pell grants at the federal level and in my state of Delaware, on SEED grants. We provide these millions of dollars in support to afford college, but we don’t tell kids they’re there until they are in high school. Most kids have already made decisions by then that make them ineligible to finish high school or attend college.
So why not tell them earlier? Particularly given the powerful potential impact of that information. By letting children know these opportunities exist from the earliest age, we can change outcomes.
Last is portability. One of the things I saw in my own experience with my own Dreamers in Delaware was how often they moved, and how often overstretched teachers with full classrooms didn’t get any information or background on the student who moved in to their classroom halfway through the year. So instead of being welcomed and engaged in a positive way, they became discipline problems or were difficult to teach to. This robust, online secure account would empower teachers to connect with parents and mentors and understand the students who are before them.
That’s why portability and persistence is an essential feature of American Dream Accounts. This way, no matter what disruptions or challenges a student might face as they travel through education, their American Dream Account would travel with them. Supportive adults -- teachers, mentors, guidance counselors -- would be able to access this information and kids would get a consistent understanding of value and impact of a future college education.
One of my favorite parts of drafting this legislation was the meetings and conversations we had with those on the front lines of education in Delaware. As a community, I heard over and over again, we’re hungry for innovative solutions. One of the many groups I met with was the Delaware PTA, who said in endorsing the American Dream Accounts Act that it incorporates the school, the parent and students to ensure each child will be closely supported with resources needed to access a post- secondary education.
The fact is, Mr. President, our nation’s long-term economic competitiveness requires a highly trained, highly educated workforce. We can meet that challenge by connecting students with a broad array of higher education options – vocational school, job training, community college or a four-year university.
This legislation will help students identify the type of higher education that’s best for them, the career they most want, and give them the tools to get there.
I have visited schools across Delaware, and one thing is clear. The vision that stays with me from my time at “I Have a Dream” to my service as a Senator is that when you ask a roomful of elementary school kids “what do you dream of being when you grow up,” they all shoot their hands in the air and they all answer that question in the same way, regardless of background or income or community they are in.
Every child begins with dreams of a full positive, educational experience and career. All of our kids start with big dreams, but the numbers show that not all our kids get there.
The American Dream Accounts Act of 2012 is a modest but powerful bill designed to empower students and parents of all backgrounds to achieve those dreams from an early age.
Mr. President, I welcome support from other of my colleagues to make this bill a reality.
Thank you.
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