Your Future and Your University

- 6 - do not attend college, many of them for financial reasons. As we look into the future the job of making sure that opportunity is available will become much more difficult. The resources to make this possible are available, but Americans are going to have to choose what they want to use their money for. We all want new cars and new highways on which to drive them. Our expenditures for tobacco, soft drinks, liquor, and other luxuries are much greater than our expenditures for higher education. It may not be possible to do everything we want to do and everything we need to do. At that point, choices will have to be made. And make no mistake about it, the strength and quality of America as a nation will depend on the choice we make. You may wonder why I chose this rather serious topic for a graduating class on such a happy occasion as Commencement. I chose it because you are the ones, primarily, who are going to make the decisions I am talking about. It is your children who will have opportunity or be excluded from it. As graduates of a fine state university, you can hold your heads high as you go out into the world because your parents and their generation made the necessary, if sometimes hard, choices in your favor. Your own children's future is up to you