Obama on "EDUCATION"

The United States has the 12th-highest college graduation rates in the world, but President Barack Obama wants to make the country No. 1 by the end of the decade.

Obama addressed student journalists nationwide in a press call with college newspapers Monday morning, laying out his plan to improve the U.S. college graduation rates by 2020.

The first step is to make college more affordable, Obama said. Earlier this year, Congress passed legislation that would change how student loans were administered. Student loans would be borrowed from and handled by the federal government, as opposed to third-party lenders. That same legislation also called for the streamlining of the FAFSA application process, which would make it is easier to borrow.

Finally, a president who gets by in another LANGUAGE

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush speaks a Tex-Mex kind of Spanish — some of this language, some of that one. Polished, it's not. Yet as he may show in Mexico this week, he's the first U.S. president reasonably proficient in another language since Herbert Hoover, who once translated a Latin manuscript on mining. Bush's ability to converse in Spanish is an oddity. The second-language skills of U.S. presidents have declined as America's position in the world has risen.