The other unfunded mandate that harms New York, and that probably harmed Iowa as well, is the unfunded mandate for testing. When you require public schools to test all of their kids, but not give them any resources to get that done, it is very difficult and I think harmful. So, if you are going to require it, you should fund it. The last thing I would do on education is to make higher education more affordable. I would offer it to any kid in America who is willing to do public service. If you’re willing to do a year of public service, you’d get two years of college paid. If you do two years of public service, you would get your full four years paid. The reason why I think this is such a good idea for young people to do public service is because a lot of the public service industries are aging and we don’t have the next generation of workers for those areas (such as) healthcare we have a nursing shortage across the country, education our teachers are aging, and so we do need to replace teachers we need more young people as firstresponders and in the military, we also need young people in these STEM jobs. You could use training in all those fields as public service opportunities that would be offered to a young person and in turn their education expenses would be paid. I think it would change the heart of the country I also think it would create a pipeline for good jobs for more young people who want to enter the workforce after graduation. Gary: There appears to be a struggle by educators, businesses, and labor organizations when it comes to matching the skills needed for a constantly changing work environment. How would you better align the skills and training needs of the workplace with the preparation of people for the workplace? Senator Gillibrand: I really love this question because it is very much a cornerstone of my presidential campaign. I believe, just as Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King, believed, that we should aspire as a nation to full employment. What that means to me is that anyone who is underemployed or unemployed should be given the opportunity for the job training that it would take them to get a job in the field they want in their community. So, I would use our community colleges, our state schools, our apprenticeship programs in our not-for-profits to train workers in the fields they want to work in. This would transform the economy almost overnight because all the people unemployed, or underemployed, would be employed and they would be able to earn higher wages and so they would be able to pay higher taxes and invest more in our communities. This is an idea that has already been put into place across the country in different communities and I will give you a couple of examples so you know how it works. First, I visited a Historically Black College in Texas, it is called Paul Quinn College. The entire school has apprenticeship programs, and internship programs, for all students that they spend time working with during their school day. By the time they graduate they are fully prepared for jobs that they have chosen for themselves and it works, it is an amazing pipeline training opportunity. A not-for-profit example is in New York City a lot of young people in the Bronx were not getting access to computer jobs and technology jobs and so a notfor-profit organization, Per Scholas, went to all the tech companies in New York City and (determined where the open jobs existed) and the skills needed to fill them. Then they created the coursework to actually supply the training for those jobs and they have already trained and placed 800 young workers all across New York. A rural example is when, Bombardier, a manufacturer of subway cars and other large vehicles needed advanced welders. They couldn’t find any within maybe a 500 mile radius. So, they decided to go to the community college and asked them if they would
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