Whether you look at these recent PISA results, which we are mediocre at best, whether you look at a 25 percent dropout rate in this country, whether you look at, in one generation, we're not doing what we need to be doing to keep America great.

State governments generate less revenue in a recession. As state leaders struggle to make up for lost revenue, legislatures tend to cut funding for higher education. Colleges, in turn, answer these funding cuts with tuition hikes.

If the goal is to dramatically improve college completion rates, not college-going rates by itself but college completion, it's not just a college problem. We need a big focus on early childhood education. Our early childhood education system is pretty good in this country. Not enough students have opportunity. And, very discouragingly, they lose their advantage because they go to poor schools after that. So, let's focus on our babies.

The jobs of the future, as you know so well, are knowledge-based. You need college-educated folks to do this work. And so the consequences for our country are absolutely devastating if we don't start to behave in very different ways.

We need to invest in very different ways. Get the students the support they need, get them the best principals, get them the great teachers, and I promise you those students would do extraordinarily well. I have seen it all my life.

To encourage more top-caliber students to choose teaching, teachers should be paid a lot more, with starting salaries more in the range of $60,000 and potential earnings of as much as $150,000.

I think every student needs access to technology, and I think technology can be a hugely important vehicle to help level the playing field.