Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the National Journal last week that, if President Barack Obama is re-elected, he will stay in his job for a second term. He plans to spent much of his time in a second term focusing on ways to rein in ballooning tuition costs and working toward the president’s goal of doubling college graduations by 2020.
“I am staying, unless the president gets sick of me,” he told Fawn Johnson of the National Journal.
Duncan and President Obama’s relationship goes back to Chicago politics and it is highly unlikely that their strong personal relationship will falter, according to Johnson.
Duncan’s focus will remain on the book-ends of education; early-childhood development and higher education. Duncan has been active on the higher education circuit in his time as Secretary of Education; holding rallies at college campuses and working to keep student loan interest rates from rising.
Duncan’s aim is to freeze or lower tuitions, and he has made his beliefs on the subject clear over the past few years, publicly lauding colleges that manage this task and publicly shaming those that raise their costs for students. Duncan told the K-12 Education Forum that he felt the government’s role was to shine a light on best practices to help the rest of the industry follow suit.
“We need to crack the nut on higher education,” he said. “Middle-class families think college is not for them.”
