Soledad O'Brien Quotes

For me, education has never been simply a policy issue - it's personal. Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college. But thanks to a lot of hard work and plenty of financial aid, I had the opportunity to attend some of the finest universities in this country.

I'm not saying everyone must go to college. What I'm saying is that every student in Texas, no matter how poor, deserves options. They must be taught to believe they can and will graduate from high school with grades good enough to succeed in trade school, in community college, or in any university in America, including Harvard, Yale, UT or A&M.

The College Access and Opportunity Act addresses the important need to make higher education more affordable and easier to access for low and middle-income students.

President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.

Pell grants are the foundation of Federal student aid. As someone who attended college with the help of Pell grants and as chairman of the Pell Grant Caucus, I know how important they are for our Nation's low-income students.

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

I want to see kids go to college more.

As the first member of my immediate family to graduate from college, making higher education more affordable and accessible is a top priority of mine.

I was the only kid out of six of us to go to college, primarily because my parents could not afford it.

We have a responsibility to ensure that every individual has the opportunity to receive a high-quality education, from prekindergarten to elementary and secondary, to special education, to technical and higher education and beyond.

They were often the first students in their family to go to college and the very idea of higher education was still foreign to them. They had to make a conscious and often difficult decision to come to college.

The one thing we can do is invest in the quality of education, especially higher education.

My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.

Early college high schools in North Carolina and across the country show us that challenge - not remediation - is an approach to education that works.

Education is an incredibly personal issue for me. If you're the first generation to go to college, sometimes you don't realize your potential until others point it out.

My mother never asked me whether I wanted to go to college, but told me I was going - to the University of Maryland on an academic scholarship.

Our goal here in New York is to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start a career or start college and to dramatically increase the number of students that graduate from college.

So if a college education is indispensable, the challenge as I see it is how to make it more accessible.

We also knew it would be difficult, because of the financial condition of the family, for me to go to college.

The need for a college education is even more important now than it was before, but I think that the increased costs are a very severe obstacle to access. It is an American dream, and I think that one of our challenges is to find a way to make that available.

Middle class families are struggling to send their sons and daughters to school. For many Americans, a college education is essential to future success.

One of the greatest obstacles to escaping poverty is the staggering cost of higher education.

Enrollment in colleges, especially black colleges, across the country increased tremendously during the five-year run of 'A Different World,' and I don't think you could have a better legacy than that.

Typically, historical black colleges and universities like Delaware State, attracted students who were raised in an environment where going to college wasn't the next natural step after high school.

It is one thing to take as a given that approximately 70 percent of an entering high school freshman class will not attend college, but to assign a particular child to a curriculum designed for that 70 percent closes off for that child the opportunity to attend college.