Today, President Obama signed H.R. 4872, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 at Northern Virginia Community College’s (NOVA) Alexandria campus. Dr. Jill Biden, the Second Lady and professor at NOVA introduced the President.

The new law invests $2 billion in new competitive career training grants, available to community colleges. The law also provides $36 billion over 10 years for Pell Grants, which will increase the maximum annual Pell Grant amount to $5,500 this year and to $5,975 by 2017.  There was also $2.55 billion available to historically black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions and $750 million for College Access Challenge Grants.

In his speech, President Obama said “We need to invest in our community colleges.  We need to invest in the future of this country.  We need to meet the goal I set last year and graduate more of our students than any other nation by the year 2020.”

President Obama also said, “And because community colleges like NOVA are so essential to a competitive workforce, I’ve asked your outstanding professor, Dr. Jill Biden…to host a summit on community colleges at the White House this fall.  And we’re going to bring everybody together, from educators to students, experts to business leaders.  We are going to bring everybody together to share innovative ideas about how we can help students earn degrees and credentials, and to forge private sector partnerships so we can better prepare America’s workforce and America’s workers to succeed in the 21st century.”

The White House released a fact sheet on the Community College and Career Training Grant program. President Obama’s and Dr. Biden’s remarks can also be found online.

Tags: community colleges, funding, Job training, Public Policy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Legislation, Public Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.