Governor Applauds $70 Million Private Gift to California Community College Students

CHANCELLOR WOODRUFF: Well, good morning and thank you all for being here. My name is Dianne Woodruff and I am pleased to serve as the chancellor of the California Community Colleges. Governor Schwarzenegger, we are just thrilled to be here with you to announce that the Bernard Osher Foundation is giving $70 million to provide scholarships for California community college students, which will help pay for textbooks, supplies and other instructional expenses. And the reason that this is so exciting for us is that this is the largest single gift that has ever been given to community colleges in the history of this country. (Applause)

The California Community Colleges serve over 2.6 million students at our 109 colleges throughout the state and we are the largest system of public higher education in the country. Our colleges are particularly grateful for this gift because we serve the state's lowest-income college students. Our full-time students have an annual median income of just $16,000 and one-fourth of these students make less than $5,000. 80 percent of our students have to work to support themselves and their families while they're going to college.

So you can imagine that this gift from Mr. and Mrs. Osher, which will provide $1,000 scholarships for students at all 109 of our community colleges, is going to make an absolutely incredible difference in the lives of our students. These scholarships will send a powerful message of hope to students all over the state that the Oshers and others believe in them and want to help them realize the American dream of getting a college education. And for many of our students I know that these scholarships will make the critical difference between whether or not they will be able to succeed in school and get that college education -- and particularly now, given the state of our economy, these scholarships are more important than ever. This gift is not only going to have a very significant impact on the success of our students but also on our colleges.

I think it is brilliant how the Osher Foundation has structured this gift. The first $25 million of the gift will immediately fund an endowment which will enable us to begin giving scholarships to students next year in 2009, but the second $25 million of the gift must be matched two to one by the community colleges. And by making the gift in this manner it will provide a very powerful incentive that will help our colleges raise other private funds. You know, I have always dreamed of having an endowment like the Harvards and the Stanfords and now, with Mr. Osher's help, we are on our way to having a $100 million endowment which will provide 5,000 scholarships every year for our students.

But that's not all. The Osher Foundation is providing an additional $20 million to support scholarships at the University of California and the California State Universities, but these will be restricted to community college transfer students. (Applause) And of course this is so important, because so many of our students do transfer to UC and CSU. In fact, almost two-thirds of all CSU graduates are community college transfers and similarly, almost one-third of all UC graduates are community college transfers. So this gift will continue to help our community college students after they leave us and have transferred to UC and CSU to help them so that they can complete their four-year degree.

Mr. Osher, there are no words that can adequately express our appreciation to you and to Mr. Osher for this extraordinary and unprecedented gift. On behalf of our 2.6 million students we sincerely thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Your pioneering leadership and your remarkable generosity will be felt by many thousands of students for generations to come, in perpetuity. What an incredible legacy you are leaving us. You are truly our hero and we wish you every happiness and the best that life has to offer. You certainly deserve it. Will all of you please join me in acknowledging and thanking Mr. Osher? (Applause)

And finally, there is one more person I want to thank. I want to thank you, Governor Schwarzenegger, for your role in helping us get this gift and I want everyone here in this room to know that this gift would not have been possible without the support of the Governor. His strong belief in our community colleges and his close relationship with the Oshers helped make this historic gift possible.

So, Governor, you are our most famous community college graduate. (Laughter) And I want you to know that I often use you and your incredible life story, which includes having attended Santa Monica College, as an example to our students, to inspire them and to tell them if you work hard enough and it's your intention, you too can be like the Governor and become the Governor of this state, or the chancellor.

So, because of your help and support with this gift, Governor, there will now be many other very successful community college graduates in the future. So, Governor, would you like to come forward and thank your friend for his incredible generosity?

GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER: Thank you very much. (Applause) Well, thank you very much, Chancellor Woodruff, for the wonderful introduction and also for the wonderful speech. I think you stole my speech. (Laughter)

CHANCELLOR WOODRUFF: Oh, I'm sorry.

GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER: But anyway, I'll just repeat the same thing again. Why not? You want to hear it from different people, just to spice it up a little bit.

But anyway, I just want to thank you for the great leadership that you have shown. I want to thank also Bernard Osher for his great generosity and for being here today with us. And Mary Bitterman, we want to thank her for her great work and Secretary David Long, thank you also very much. And Toya Copeland, who is going to talk to us a little bit and tell her story, we want to thank her also for being here today.

And you're absolutely correct; I think that I am a good example about community college, how important that is. As a matter of fact, people always ask me, they say, "What's the secret to your success?"

I always say, "Come to America, go to community college and marry a Kennedy." (Applause) It's all very simple. (Laughter)

Anyway, obviously I'm a very happy governor here today and that's because I get to stand here with a remarkable and generous man and announce the single largest gift ever to a community college system anywhere in America in history. And Bernard Osher and his wife Barbro, who could not be with us here today, have opened up their hearts and have opened up their checkbook, to donate $70 million to our community colleges here in California. What an amazing display of generosity and what an amazing gift for our community colleges which serve so many vital roles in California.

They offer a first-rate education and they are accessible and affordable to just about anyone. They are the gateway also to our four-year universities. In fact, 60 percent of CSU and 30 percent of UC graduates are community college transfers. They are also a leading provider for job training and career-tech education and we all know how important career-tech education is to us. Community colleges train 80 percent of California firefighters and law enforcement officers and EMTs and 70 percent of California's nurses.

Now I, as you have heard, have a firsthand experience with community colleges and specifically with the Santa Monica Community College. And I think that's why I'm such a big believer in community colleges, because when I first came over here I went to Santa Monica College to learn English -- not that it is perfect, may I remind you -- but nevertheless, it did help. (Laughter)

And what was remarkable was because that was really my intention, just to take some English classes. But. because of extraordinary counselors. they offered me other classes. And they knew that I was interested in business, so all of a sudden I was taking micro and macroeconomics and political history and American history and political science and computer and there were math classes and it went on and on. And community colleges prepared me for the four-year university and then I finally got my degree. So it was really remarkable, how this is kind of the springboard to success and this is why I'm a big supporter of it.

And what's so great about Osher's donation is that we hope, as you have heard, that we can leverage that donation, the $70 million, with an additional $50 million, which will altogether be $120 million dollars. And I think this is extraordinary because this money will provide scholarships for more than 5,000 students and that number will continue to grow year after year.

That money covers more than just fees, as you have also heard, because it is there also to purchase equipment and to help with books -- and as you know, that books costs hundreds of dollars for our students every year. And it also covers uniforms, if you want to become, for instance, study to be a nurse or a carpenter and so on.

So Osher's action will lift up so many of our students that are struggling to get by. So on behalf of the 2.6 million students I just want to say thank you very much again for your great generosity. And of course this is not the only area where he is donating money; he has just been always a very, very generous person. And so we want to thank you for believing in the philosophy that it's not important of how much money you have, but how much money that you give and what you give to the community. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Thank you very much. Thank you.

CHANCELLOR WOODRUFF: Thank you, Governor. And now Mary Bitterman, the president of the Bernard Osher Foundation, will speak on behalf of Mr. Osher. Mary, we would like to publicly thank you and your staff for your role in helping us get this gift. (Applause)

MARY BITTERMAN: We've been working for some time to reach this moment and so we want to savor every second of it. The founder of our foundation, which began 31 years ago, has really focused attention on higher education and the arts. And in fact, as the Governor noted, has been a very generous supporter of California even though he's a boy from Maine and supporting with grants to higher education in California of over $100 million before this grant.

Bernard Osher, who does not like to speak or to be recognized -- but since I'm here and the press is here, there's nothing he can do about it. (Laughter) Our founder is the son of immigrants from Russia and Lithuania. He grew up working in his family's hardware and plumbing supply store in Bitterford, Maine. He and his four siblings were able to go to university but his parents didn't have that opportunity. His goal has always been to expand access for people to pursue higher education.

Last year, at the instigation of our good friend Charlotte Schultz, Mr. and Mrs. Osher came up to me with Governor Schwarzenegger to discuss how our foundation might be able to assist the California Community College system. And I must say, with the splendid assistance of the Governor's Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy, his then-Deputy Chief of Staff Ross LaJeunesse, who is here -- and ironically, when we came to see the Governor a year ago, we thought there was something a bit odd and that is that the Governor's deputy chief of staff would also be from Bitterford, Maine and that his family would also have a hardware and plumbing supply store. We thought that was just too incredible, too incredible.

And then, of course, Margaret Fortune, who was working here with the Governor as well, as special assistant. They, together with Chancellor Dianne Woodruff and the new president of our Foundation for California Community Colleges, Paul Lanning, we have all worked together in earnest, along with our wonderful attorney Cynthia Rowland from the Coblentz Firm, everybody working together to make sure that we could come up with a proper funding instrument that would redound to the benefit of not only the 2.6 million people involved in our community colleges today, but so many more people and students in the years ahead.

The hope of the Bernard Osher Foundation is that this gift, totaling $70 million, will alert other funders to the importance of enhancing educational opportunity for our community college students and that foundations -- community foundations throughout California, other private foundations, distinguished alumni of our community college system, businesses who so depend on the educational background and talent of our community college students -- will all come together and not only arise to have $100 million in scholarships, with the additional $20 million for CSU and UC campuses for community college transfer students, but that a few years from now the Governor will be pointing out that this endowment has now reached $1 billion.

You know, Bernard Osher says every day in the foundation -- my office is next to him and when we're not listening to opera he is underscoring the fact that we need to focus, focus, focus. And right now the focus of our foundation is on the most needy of California's community college students. We want our investment to help them realize their full potential and to make their mark. We are honored to work with the state of California on this grand investment, the wisest investment of all, in the people of California now and for generations to come.

Thank you so much from Bernard Osher, from Barbro Osher, from the trustees of our foundation and from all of our staff at the Bernard Osher Foundation. (Applause)

CHANCELLOR WOODRUFF: Well, we are very pleased to have many of our students here to celebrate this important moment with us. And as you can see, they're all wearing California Community College t-shirts so you can identify them and have a chance to meet them. And as many of you know, compared to the average four-year undergraduate student, our community college students typically not only are lower income, but they are typically more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and age. In fact, almost half our students are over age 24. In addition, many community college students are often the first ones in their families to go to college.

And now I have a very, very special treat for you. I would like to introduce one of our students who has been the recipient of an Osher scholarship at San Francisco City College. Prior to giving this gift that we are getting today for all 109 community colleges, the Oshers funded scholarships in their hometown in San Francisco, at San Francisco City College, for the last several years. So it gives me great pleasure to ask our Osher scholar, Toyia Copeland, to please come forward and say a few words. (Applause)

TOYIA COPELAND: Good morning. My name is Toyia Copeland; I'm here with my amazing daughter (Inaudible). I want to thank Mr. and Mrs. Osher for their generosity and I want to share briefly with all of you how the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Osher impacted my life and my education. I received one of the Osher scholarships when I was a student at City College of San Francisco. This scholarship assisted me in purchasing textbooks that semester -- and as you know, textbooks are expensive and any help is welcomed. Moreover than receiving the gift and the scholarship for the textbooks, I'm just pleased that someone believed in me and cared enough to share their good fortune with me. It has inspired me and continues to inspire me today. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Osher.

I would like you to know that last May I graduated with my A.S. degree in culinary arts from City College of San Francisco and I am now attending San Francisco State University majoring in Recreation, Parks and Tourism with an emphasis -- (Applause) with an emphasis in non-profit administration. In addition to my studies I intern for the YMCA at the Western Addition Beacon Community Center in San Francisco and as an outreach troop leader for the Girl Scout's of Northern California. These commitments keep me busy, but my children, like Aysha, who is a first-year student at city college of San Francisco, inspires me the most. I'm very proud to tell you that my daughter will be transferring to San Jose State University and major in Kinesiology so she can be a physical therapist. So as you can see -- (Applause) So as you can see, your gift -- it influences generations and thank you so much. (Applause)

CHANCELLOR WOODRUFF: Thank you so much. We are so proud of both of you. And now I'd like to introduce some other people on the podium; David Long, the Governor's secretary of Education; Lance Izumi, the president of our Board of Governors for California Community Colleges and the rest of our board is in the audience. Over here we have Jim Sargen, who is the president of our foundation and Paul Lanning, who is the CEO of our Community College Foundation. And finally, Kathy McKim, who is the vice-president of AT&T, which is one of the sponsors of our reception to celebrate the event.

So with that, we want to say once again thank you, thank you to the Governor, to Mr. Osher, to Mary and to all of you for being here. We look forward to working with all of you to open your checkbooks to help us raise this match.