We all have a role to play - the President, Congress, parents, students and schools - in making college affordable and keeping the middle class dream alive.
A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.
When I was at drama school I wanted to do classical theatre. It just so happened that I did a film when I came out and I moved that way.
I have never done any other job. I have sung in bands since I was 15. I left school completely unqualified. I have no other training.
I came from a small town and at school in one class there was me, a member from Depeche Mode and someone who went on to join The Cure. That was all in one class of 30 kids.
Our Father Who Art in Heaven gathered more meaning for me as my own father joined the Maker when I was still in school.
Through the Internet, I've developed a strong social network - something I could never do if I had to keep my choice of peers within school grounds.
At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.
My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn't like that.
We're used to the characteristics of social media - participation, connection, instant gratification - and when school doesn't offer the same, it's easy to tune out.
Hollywood is just like high school. The popular people only like the other popular people. And the thing is, some people aren't nice - or they're nice, but only to your face, not elsewhere.
You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.
And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.
In film, I don't think I'd try directing. Maybe one day, but I'd certainly want to go to film school or something before I tried to do something like that. That would be quite scary.
People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I've never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn't me at all.
Going back to high school and college, I believed I would be involved in public service. I literally could not conceptualize anything else.
I was doing theater in my high school, and I started writing sort of silly songs on the piano backstage in summer theater. I eventually put them online and started getting this little following.
And that had a powerful appeal, particularly to those who had been denied the choice to stay on at school, to go to university, to be something else, other than going down the pit.
Before I had decided to get into politics, I was laying the groundwork to have a career in the law, but that was really to lay the foundation to teach, either at the college level or law school level after my federal clerkships.
I've noticed that my resolutions involve me not doing stuff that I wasn't going to do anyway so here's something more positive. I'm going to retrain as a Latin teacher in a provincial public school.
