At Community College in N.Y., Obama Lays Out Plan for Fostering Innovation

President Obama went to Hudson Valley Community College today to talk about his administration’s strategy to spark innovation and job growth, delivering a speech that reiterated his plans to spend more money on basic science (with a goal of putting 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product into research and development) and to focus on spurring advances in key fields such as health-related technologies and alternative energies. The president lavished praise on community colleges, saying they have the power to prepare America for a “21st-century global economy,” and said it was important to meet his goals of graduating more students from two-year institutions because the number of jobs requiring at least an associate degree are expected to grow twice as fast as the number of jobs without college requirements.