Q    Mr. President, tied in with the jobs situation I think is the education system.  And it seems to be in a crisis now, and people are not being educated to take these jobs that are going to be created.  And I wondered what sort of plans you might have for that.

THE PRESIDENT:  That’s a great question.  Are you in education?

Q    No.

THE PRESIDENT:  No?

Q    I’m a nurse.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, that’s important, too.

Q    Yes.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thanks for the care you give to people all day long.  I’m a big fan of nurses.

The thing that will probably most determine our success in the 21st century is going to be our education system.  I’ll just give you a quick statistic（统计数值） .  A generation ago, we ranked number one in the number of college graduates.  We’ve now slipped to number 12 in the number of college graduates.  That’s just in one generation.  That is putting us at a huge competitive disadvantage.  Because, look, companies these days, they can locate anywhere.  You’ve got an Internet line, you can set your company up in India, you can set up your company in the Czech Republic -- it doesn’t really matter where you are.

And so what that means is a lot of companies are going to look for where can they find the best workforce.  And we have to make sure that that is in Columbus, Ohio.  We’ve got to make sure that that’s in Toledo.  We’ve got to make sure that that’s in the United States of America.

Now, we still have the best universities and the best colleges on Earth.  But there are a couple of problems that have come up.  First of all, our education starts at K-12.  And we’re not doing a good enough job at the K-12 level making sure that all our kids are proficient（精通的） in math, in science, in reading and writing.

And what we’ve done is we’ve set up something called the Race to the Top, where, although a lot of federal money still flows to schools just based on a formula and based on need, we’ve taken a certain amount of money and we’ve said, you know what, you’ve got to compete for this money.  And you’ve got to show us that you’ve got a plan to improve the education system, to fix low-performing schools, to improve how you train teachers -- because teachers are the single most important ingredient（原料，要素） in the education system -- to collect data to show that you’re improving how these kids are learning.

And what’s happened is, is that states all across the country have actually responded really well, and we’ve seen the majority of states change their laws to start doing this bottom-up, grassroots reform of the K-12 system.  That’s critical.  That’s number one.

The second thing that we’ve got to solve is that college became unaffordable for a lot of people.  And Joe and Rhonda, we were just talking -- we’re about the same age and we got married I think the same year.  Our kids are about the same age.  So we’ve kind of gone through the same stuff.  And Michelle and I -- I don't know about you guys -- we didn’t talk about this -- but Michelle and I, we had a lot of debt when we finished school.  It was really expensive.  And neither of us came from wealthy families, so we just had to take out a bunch of student loans.  It took us about 10 years to pay off our student loans.  It was actually higher than our mortgage for most of the time.

And I don’t want that burden to be placed on kids right now. Because a lot of them, as a consequence, maybe they decide not to go to college, or, if they do, they end up getting off to a really tough start because their pay just is not going to support the amount of debt that they’ve got.

So here’s what we did.  Working with Sherrod, working with Mary Jo, Democrats in Congress -- this didn’t get a lot of attention, but we actually completely transformed how the government student loan program works.  Originally what was happening was all those loans were going through banks and financial intermediaries（中介机构） .  And even though the loans were guaranteed by the government so the banks weren’t taking any risks, they were skimming off（挑选） billions of dollars in profits.

And we said, well, that doesn't make any sense.  If we’re guaranteeing it, why don't we just give the loans directly to the students, and we’ll take all that extra billions of dollars that were going to the banks as profits, and we’ll give more loans.  And as a consequence, what we’ve been able to do is to provide millions more students additional loans and make college more affordable over time.  That's the second thing.

Third thing we’ve got to do is we’ve got to focus on community colleges, which are a wonderful asset.  Not everybody is going to go to a four-year college.  And even if you go to a four-year college, you may need to go back and retrain two years -- for a year or two, even while you’re working, to keep up, keep pace with new technologies and new developments in your industry. So what we’ve really tried to do is to partner with community colleges, figure out how we can strengthen them, put more resources into them, and link them up to businesses who are actually hiring so that they’re training people for the jobs that exist, as opposed to the jobs that don’t.

One of the problems we’ve had for a lot of young people is they go to college, training for a job, thinking that their job  -- or thinking there’s a job out there, and actually the economy has moved on.  And what we need to do is tailor people’s education so that they are linked up with businesses who say, we need this many engineers, or we need this kind of technical training, and we’ll help design what that training is -- so that when that person goes to college and they’re taking out some of those loans to go to college, they know at the end of the road there’s actually going to be a job available to them.

Last thing -- math, science, we’ve really got to emphasize those.  That's an area where we’ve really fallen far behind, and our technological competitiveness is going to depend on how well we do in math and science.

Okay.  Yes, sir.