Remarks at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Hello, hello, hello! Thank you very much. Everybody, please have a seat. Thank you. Hello, Pittsburgh! It is good to be back. Thank you, Senator Casey and Mayor Ravenstahl, County Executive Dan Onorato, State Auditor Jack Wagner, and all of you for having me back here at Carnegie Mellon. It is good to be here.

And it seems like every time I'm here I learn something. So for those of you who are thinking about Carnegie Mellon, it's a terrific place, and you guys are doing just great work.

I just met with folks from some cutting-edge companies and saw some of their inventions here in your National Robotics Engineering Center. But that's not the only reason I'm here. You might not know this, but one of my responsibilities as Commander in Chief is to keep an eye on robots. [Laughter] And I'm pleased to report that the robots you manufacture here seem peaceful--[Laughter]--at least for now.

This is a city that knows something about manufacturing. For generations of Americans, it was the ticket to a middle class life. Here and across America's industrial heartland, millions clocked in each day at foundries and on assembly lines to make things. And the stuff we made--steel, cars, planes--was the stuff that made America what it is. The jobs were good. They paid enough to own a home, to raise kids, send them to college, to retire. They were jobs that told us something more important than just how much money we made, what was in our paycheck. These jobs also told us that we were meeting our responsibilities to our family and to our neighborhoods, and building our communities, and building our country.

But for better and worse, our generation has been pounded by wave after wave of profound economic change. Revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live and the way we work. Businesses and industries can relocate anywhere in the world--anywhere that there are skilled workers, anywhere that there is an Internet connection. And companies have learned to become more efficient with fewer employees. In Pittsburgh you know this as well as anybody. Steel mills that once needed a thousand workers now do the same work with a hundred.

And while these changes have resulted in great wealth for some Americans and have drastically increased productivity, they've also caused major disruptions for many others. Today, a high school diploma no longer guarantees you a job. Over the past 13 years, about a third of our manufacturing jobs have vanished. And meanwhile, the typical worker's wages have barely kept up with the rising costs of everything else. And all this was even before a financial crisis and recession that pounded the middle class even more.

Now, we've made some tough decisions that have turned our economy in a positive direction over the past 2 years. We've created more than 2 million new jobs in the private sector over the past 15 months alone, including almost 250,000 in manufacturing. But we still have to confront those underlying problems. They weren't caused overnight, and we won't solve them overnight. But we will solve them. And we're starting to solve them right here in Pittsburgh and right here at Carnegie Mellon.

And by the way, that's why I ran for President. Not just to get us back to where we were--I ran for President to get us to where we need to be. I have a larger vision for America, one where working families feel secure, feel like they are moving forward and that they know that their dreams are within reach, an America where our businesses lead the world in new technologies like clean energy, where we work together, Democrats and Republicans, to live within our means, to cut our deficit and debt, but also to invest in what our economy needs to grow: world-class education, cutting-edge research, and building the best transportation and communication infrastructure anywhere in the world. That's what it's going to take for us to win the future. And winning the future begins with getting our economy moving right now.

And that's why we're here. Carnegie Mellon is a great example of what it means to move forward. At its founding, no one would have imagined that a trade school for the sons and daughters of steelworkers would one day become the region's largest--one of the region's largest employers and a global research university. And yet innovations led by your professors and your students have created more than 300 companies and 9,000 jobs over the past 15 years, companies like Carnegie Robotics.

But more important than the ideas that you've incubated are what those ideas have become: They've become products made right here in America, and in many cases, sold all over the world. And that's in our blood. That's who we are. We are inventors and we are makers and we are doers.

If we want a robust, growing economy, we need a robust, growing manufacturing sector. That's why we told the auto industry 2 years ago that if they were willing to adapt, we'd stand by them. Today, they're profitable, they're creating jobs, and they're repaying taxpayers ahead of schedule.

That's why we've launched a partnership to retrain workers with new skills. That's why we've invested in clean energy manufacturing and new jobs building wind turbines and solar panels and advanced batteries. We have not run out of stuff to make. We've just got to reinvigorate our manufacturing sector so that it leads the world the way it always has, from paper and steel and cars to new products that we haven't even dreamed up yet. That's how we're going to strengthen existing industries; that's how we're going to spark new ones. That's how we're going to create jobs, grow the middle class, and secure our economic leadership.