Generic capabilities in mathematics, writing, and verbal skills are key to the ability to learn and to apply new skills and thus to earn higher real wages over time. The avenues to acquiring those skills are many, and one effective tool that we have developed to facilitate the transition to a new job or profession has been our community colleges. These two-year institutions have been in the forefront of teaching the types of skills that build on workers’ previous experiences to create new job skills. Currently almost one in three of their enrollees are aged thirty or older, a statistic that suggests that these individuals have previous job experience. The impressive expansion of these learning centers attests to their success in imparting both general and practical job-related learning.

—Alan Greenspan, Chairman
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

The reason that I’m so adamant about supporting community colleges is that I’m worried about the increasing division that is building in our country between the already privileged and everybody else, between the haves and the have-nots, between those whose incomes have exploded and those who have stagnated or even fallen back. If we don’t continue to invest in community colleges as a tangible commitment to increasing opportunity, we will see those statistics worsen. So it’s not just a nice thing to have a community college, it’s not just a good contribution to the community, it’s an essential part of ensuring fairness, equality, opportunity, and responsibility in our nation.

—Hillary Rodham Clinton
United States Senator

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