Jill Biden

I’ve seen with my own students, community colleges offer an affordable route to four-year college degrees and good paying jobs.

Community colleges are certainly one of America’s best-kept secrets.

One of the things that make community colleges so special is they do not pick and choose their students – they work with all students.

As a community college professor for over twenty years, I’ve seen the determination, resilience and dedication of countless students. Regardless of circumstances, they show up. They work hard. They believe anything is possible.

In the past, there has been a stigma surrounding community colleges, where they were seen as a less viable option because they are not four-year universities. I know differently and so do the millions of people across the country who have received an affordable, quality higher education at community college.

Being a teacher is not what I do, it’s who I am.

Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.

The function of this school is custodial. It’s here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.

… because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college.

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

Poorer students take out larger loans and will have to contribute more to the cost of higher education.

[On school] Not only did I know that I wasn’t one of the smart kids in the class, but so did everyone else.

Most of all we need an education system which will create an educated mind. This is a mind not simply a repository of information and skills, but a mind that is a source of creative skepticism, characterized by a willingness to challenge old assumptions and to be challenged, a spaciousness of outlook, and convictions that are deeply held, but which new facts and new experiences can always modify. It means an educational system which does not simply equip the students to adjust to society, but which enables the student to challenge and to modify, and at times reject, if necessary, the received wisdom of his elders.

In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a prerequisite.

My last year in high school, I worked at a bindery, side by side with grown-ups who had been there their entire lives. Knowing that I, as a 16-year-old, was getting the same income and doing the same work… it gave me respect for those workers. But it also gave me an understanding that more is needed for folks to be able to cobble together a decent life on minimum wage.

Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime that ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer.

By making college unaffordable and student loans unbearable, we risk deterring our best and brightest from pursuing higher education and securing a good paying job.

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.

Perhaps because my father never got a college degree himself, he continued to view people who had one with a respect that bordered on awe. In most cases they didn’t deserve it. My father could run circles around most academics and he would have done very well in college, if he’d been able to go.

A man’s college and university degrees mean nothing to me until I see what he is able to do with them.

Every child must be encouraged to get as much education as he has the ability to take. We want this not only for his sake — but for the future of our nation’s sake. Nothing matters more to the future of our country: not our military preparedness — for armed might is worthless if we lack the brainpower to build world peace; not our productive economy — for we cannot sustain growth without trained manpower; not our democratic system of government – for freedom is fragile if citizens are ignorant.