In his third State of the Union Address last Tuesday, President Obama stressed the importance of bolstering our education systemto secure America’s place in the technologically advanced future.

“Many business leaders want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills,” said Obama,”Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job.”

“At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced states to lay off thousands of teachers,” said the President.

The steadily increasing cost of tuitiondrew a strong warning from Obama, “Let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury. It is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”

In the address, the President also stressed that community colleges are key in solving the unemployment crisis. Obama called for more businesses to create partnerships with community colleges, giving them the resources they need to become “community career centers,” which Obama said, “[are] places that teach people skills that businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.”

In addition to education, the speech touched on the struggling economy, job creation, the energy crisis, the wars in the Middle East and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

President Obama also spoke to those who have grown weary of the relentless power struggle in Washington, “We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction, that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around commonsense ideas.”

“What’s at stake aren’t Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. And we have to reclaim them.”