Obama Speaks to Students in Ann Arbor

By Evan Ferraro

On January 27, President Barack Obama visited Ann Arbor to speak about college tuition costs and how he would go about lowering them.  In his speech, Obama cited the fact that in some cases, debts on student loans were beginning to surpass amounts of credit card debts.  

He discussed how states had made plans to disinvest in spending money on public universities,  and that this caused some universities’ tuition to double in price.

Obama related his own struggle with student loan debts.

“We should push colleges to do better; we should hold them accountable if they don’t,” he said, saying that we, “cannot keep subsidizing student aid.”

Several Saline students attended Obama’s speech, and we spoke with two of them: senior Aaron Mukerjee and sophomore Devyn McChesney.

Mukerjee works with Obama for America- Michigan.

When asked about the issue of rising college tuition, he says, “Credit card debt has already skyrocketed. College needs to be affordable for everybody.”  

Mukerjee continued, saying that Obama didn’t actually pay off his student debt until he had published his first book.

“It just goes to show that for anybody it can be an issue whether you are the president or an average person,” says Mukerjee.

Aaron stated that he would strongly consider voting for Obama, and if re-elected, he is hopeful that Obama would be successful at lowering college tuition.

McChesney considers the rising tuition “unfortunate,” and that, “It’s something we’re going to face, something we’re going to have to work harder with.”

If he were given the opportunity to vote, he said that he would not vote to re-elect Obama. McChesney says that while Obama may work to lower costs of college tuition, other cost issues would arise elsewhere.  

If Obama were to be re-elected, he believes that he would definitely make “attempts” to solve the problem, but never truly succeed in making great change happen.

Rising tuition costs has forced many graduated college students to start their careers in serious debt.  Obama’s speech helped people to understand just how serious the issue has become and related to the people by sharing his own experience. How this growing problem will be solved is yet another question to be answered on November 6.

Posted by hsnews on 12:15 AM. Filed under annarbor, community news, news . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0