Update 2:58 p.m.
We caught up with several folks waiting in line to get tickets to President Barack Obama's speech tomorrow. We asked them if there was anything in particular they wanted to hear the president talk about:
"I hope that they increase the Pell Grant, make it more affordable for people so that we’re not re-mortgaging our house over and over to pay for our kids’ to go to college."
- Angela Lasiewick. Her daughter is a junior in high school.
"My concern is how we’re going to, what steps he’s going to take help us pay back these student loans. If they’re going to decrease insurance rates, if they’re going to make some sort of allowance for us to be able to live once we graduate with these large debts."
- Ada Nwaneri has racked up $136,000 in student loans from undergrad, graduate, and law school.
"I want to hear specifically what he wants to do with the rising tuition costs...of debt forgiveness. And another issue I care about is what he's going to do with the banks as far as opening up lines of credit for the
- Leo Esclamado is a graduate student in the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan.
"I was a little skeptical about attending, but I'm interested in hearing his message, what he has to say about the rising cost of higher education."
- LaFleur Stephens is a graduate student in political science. She has about $30,000 in student loan debt.
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama touched on college affordability, and put colleges and universities on notice when he said:
"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."
After Mr. Obama's speech, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman said in a written statement she "could not agree more with the president that we, as a nation, must recommit ourselves to higher education that is accessible to all."
1:01 p.m.
There were just 3,000 tickets available.
They were free, but people did "pay" for them by waiting in a long line outside the Michigan Union Ticket Office, where the free tickets were given out starting at 9 a.m. this morning.
As the Detroit Free Press' Mike Brookbank reports, the first person to receive a ticket arrived last night:
Teman Evans didn’t intend to do it. But the 32-year-old turned out to be the first in line at the University of Michigan’s Union Ticket Office. By this morning, thousands were behind him in a line that snaked for blocks outside the Michigan Union on State Street. “I got here at 7:30 last night and thought there’d be a whole crew waiting for a month and somehow I was the first one,” said Evans.
People who arrived at 6 a.m. this morning found a long line of people who had been waiting overnight. The line stretched down State Street, down E. William St., and then snaked around to the University of Michigan's Administration building.
Six hours later, 3,000 people had tickets to see President Obama's speech tomorrow at the University of Michigan's Al Glick Fieldhouse. The Fieldhouse is the University of Michigan's football practice facility.
Mr. Obama's stop in Ann Arbor is his second as President. He gave the commencement address in 2010.
This stop is one of many he is making across the country in the wake of his State of the Union speech. He's expected to talk about his ideas for keeping college education affordable.
