Access to Higher Education Quotes

Without affirmative action I could never have attended Yale University. Without affirmative action Barack Obama would never have gotten into Colombia and Harvard Law school

Affirmative action is not going to be the long-term solution to the problems of race in America, because, frankly, if you've got 50 percent of African-American or Latino kids dropping out of high school, it doesn't really matter what you do in terms of affirmative action. Those kids aren't going to college.

Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system.

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout the land.

I will never allow non-Bumiputra students to enter Universiti Teknologi Mara. I will not compromise on this matter.

In the end, arguing about affirmative action in selective colleges is like arguing about the size of a spigot while ignoring the pool and the pipeline that feed it. Slots at Duke and Princeton and Cal are finite.

Like most people, my parents were only able to fulfil their dreams because there was support. A council home so they could save for a deposit to buy a home of their own. Fantastic local state schools where my own daughters go now. Affordable university places and good quality apprenticeships.

If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.

We have a government that boasts about free education. Those of us who have scratched below the surface know it is costing us by denying opportunities for others to attend college or university.

We need a movement that says in a highly competitive global economy all of our kids who have the ability, the qualifications and the desire, will be able to get a college education regardless of income because we will make public colleges and universities tuition free.

I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.

At a time when the average student is graduating from a four-year college $27,000 in debt, when hundreds of thousands of capable young people no longer see college as an option because of high costs and when the U.S. is falling further and further behind our economic competitors in terms of the percentage of young people graduating from college, no agreement should be passed which, over a period of years, makes a bad situation worse and will make college even less affordable than it is today.

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.

Sometimes political correctness runs amok in our public education system where we think that every kid can go to a four-year university.

I think that education is a pathway out of poverty for many people. It was for our family.

Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

We can't accept that it's O.K. if only some kids get to go to college.

Everybody around the world wants to send their kids to our universities. But nobody wants to send their kids here to public school.

As an older generation, we need to give all our young people love and the possibility of realizing their dreams. For instance, if I get really political, the fact that some people can't go to college, can't even think about college, that's not American; that's not right.

When I look at 55 percent of our black men dropping out of school, how bad off are we going to be when we need some lawyers?

Let Girls Learn issue has always been personal for me. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where most folks, including my parents, didn't have college degrees. But with a lot of hard work - and a lot of financial aid - I had the chance to attend Princeton and Harvard Law School, and that gave me the confidence to pursue my ambitions.