Background on the President’s Trip to Intel and Investments in Education

This Friday, the President will travel to Hillsboro, Oregon and visit Intel Corporation where he will tour the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility with Intel CEO Paul Otellini. The President will also learn more about Intel’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education programs and Intel’s efforts to better prepare people to compete for high-tech jobs and be the minds behind the next great inventions.  He will then make remarks about the importance of out-educating the competition in order to win the future.  As he laid out in his State of the Union address and in the Fiscal Year 2012 budget released this week, President Obama believes that in order to win the future for this generation and the next, we must win the race to educate our kids.  His plan calls for key investments in education to grow the economy and create the jobs and industries of the future by doing what America does best – investing in the creativity and imagination of our people. Intel has committed to investing more than $6 billion in their U.S.-based manufacturing facilities to support future technology advancements in Arizona and Oregon, creating more than 6,000 construction jobs and more than 800 permanent high-tech jobs. The President’s remarks will also be streamed live at obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/Live.
 
The Administration has made important strides in achieving President Obama’s goal of challenging the status quo in education and driving forward reform in our nation’s schools. Today’s economy demands a workforce that is smart, skilled, creative and equipped for success in a global marketplace. Building on the success of Race to the Top, he is calling on Congress to re-define and right-size the federal role in education, by replacing No Child Left Behind with a new law that raises expectations, challenges failure, rewards success, and provides greater flexibility for schools to innovate and improve results for their students. The President is also pledging to prepare an additional 100,000 science, technology, engineering, and math teachers by the end of the decade. To help restore America’s global leadership in higher education, the President will continue efforts to strengthen the Pell Grant program and is calling on Congress to make permanent his American Opportunity Tax Credit, worth $10,000 for four years of college.
 
Companies like Intel are helping us achieve these important education and innovation goals. They know that government and industry must work together so that America can out-educate, out-build, and out-innovate the rest of world.   Over the past decade, Intel and the Intel Foundation have invested more than $1 billion toward improving education.  In 2010, in conjunction with President Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign, Intel announced a 10-year, $200 million commitment to advance education in math and science in the U.S. Intel is also one of four founding companies of Change the Equation, a CEO-led initiative designed to answer the president’s call to move the U.S. to the top in science and math education over the next decade.