Tim Matheson Quotes

I do believe that education should become as close to free as possible.

Students want free education because their parents are struggling. The fees of universities and technikons are too high.

Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.

We should be trying to make education less expensive, not more.

You can't continue to have higher education tuition grow at a multiple of the rate of inflation.

If it is the duty of the State to educate, it is the duty of the State also to bear the burden of education, namely, the taxation out of which education is provided.

When we make college more affordable, we make the American dream more achievable.

Kids should go to college, but they should go to the best school they can afford to get through with minimal or no debt. That might mean going to a community college or an inexpensive local state school. Whatever it takes.

If you’re not familiar with it, a college degree is a thing that we tell our kids to buy with money they don’t have, in hopes that it will help them make money they might earn, which will give them the ability to pay back the money they spent in order to make the money they’re paying it back with.

How can the United States be competitive globally if higher education is unaffordable? Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Scotland and Sweden have no tuition for college. Other countries have low tuition. We need the best educated workforce in the world. Instead of spending endless amounts on the military, we need to invest in our young people.

In other countries, rich and poor, education remains substantially free, with educational standards that rank high in global comparisons. Even in the US, higher education was almost free during the economically successful years before the neoliberal reaction - and it was a much poorer country then. The GI bill provided free education to huge numbers of people - white men overwhelmingly - who would probably never have gone to college, a great benefit to them personally and to the whole society. Tuition at private colleges was far below today's exorbitant costs.

I was told that my going to college wouldn't be good for my career. I think that's nonsense. It's good to empower yourself by cutting yourself off from this business every once in a while.

By making college more affordable for all and more accessible for minority students, the first new higher education authorizing legislation in a decade will help strengthen our nation and America's middle class, and spur a new age of innovation and ingenuity in our country.

If I were president, I would want to spend a lot of time going to the legislatures and telling them about best practices, whether it's about fighting poverty, whether it's about educating kids. The states are the laboratories where we can see what works. And I think presidents can have a much better relationship with legislatures.

Now all of the ideas that I'm talking about, they are not radical ideas. Making public colleges and universities tuition free, that exists in countries all over the world, used to exist in the United States. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and creating 13 million jobs by doing away with tax loopholes that large corporations now enjoy by putting their money into the Cayman Islands and other tax havens. That is not a radical idea.

When we talk about something like student loans, what we should be talking about is the fact that every American wants their kids to do better than we have done. If we can get that, the other thing we'd really like is for our kids to be able to come home and raise their kids in the community where we raised them. What unites all of us, no matter where you live in the country, is we want our family to be safe, we want the next generation in our family to be more successful than us, and we would like our family to be close together.

I think, again, on issues of energy, how are we going to fully utilize our energy resources in this country? What is the role of the federal government in higher education? What kind of justices would you appoint to the Supreme Court, not just because we have a vacancy now, but at least one or two potentially in the next four to eight years?

I think what grows the economy is when you get that tax credit that we put in place for your kids going to college. I think that grows the economy. I think what grows the economy is when we make sure small businesses are getting a tax credit for hiring veterans who fought for our country. That grows our economy.

We need to figure how to defend higher education as a public good. If we can't do that, we're in trouble.

When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.

Every person in this country who has the desire and ability should be able to get all the education they need regardless of the income of their family. This is not a radical idea. In Germany, Scandinavia and many other countries, higher education is either free or very inexpensive. We must do the same.

Hillary Clinton has a $350 billion plan that she says will make college more affordable. Which has to be better than my parents' plan to make college affordable: 'Be good at sports.'

Increasing access to federal student loans has been a bipartisan effort in Washington, one that I have supported. But it has created what many experts believe is a bubble in higher education, not unlike the housing bubble that preceded the financial crisis.

Ronald Reagan four times accepted the limits in contributions of what he could take, what he could spend, and the public funding for the general elections. So I just think the idea that it didn't work, and didn't work - it did work. It worked brilliantly.

With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres.