We will work with industrial or Dept. Of Defence sponsorship as long as we keep our principals of openness firm we're proud to work with the military, and they respect that in turn.

I would also certainly continue to keep loan repayment interest rates as low as possible. And I would spread the financial aid a little less thinly across all income brackets.

On the other hand, it is not fair to say that changes in federal policy have caused our tuition to rise faster. Every economic argument imaginable would indicate that we should raise tuition at a faster rate than we do.

Agency by agency, we frequently have lost a bit of ground, at least to inflation-but had it not been for the efforts we've made to educate people about the importance of science, technology and advanced education, those predictions very well might have come true.

Given the best of all possible worlds, I would make a few changes. I would place emphasis on increasing the amount of funding that goes into programs like Pell Grants, that purely and simply award funds to students who really cannot afford full tuition.

The Science Coalition, which grew out of an initial concept at Harvard and at MIT, has now grown to an informal group of about 60 research universities.

Over-reliance on strictly economic justifications has already begun to hurt the quality and range of education at every level of American life.