In his speech on the economy Wednesday in Galesburg, Ill., President Barack Obama vowed to put his platform to use to defray soaring education costs and invest in early childhood education in order to strengthen the middle class.

“If you think education is expensive, wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century,” Obama said. “If we don’t make this investment, we’re going to put our kids, our workers, and our country at a competitive disadvantage for decades. So we have to begin in the earliest years, and that’s why I’ll keep pushing to make high-quality preschool available to every four year-old in America.”

“I’m also going to use the power of my office over the next few months to highlight a topic that’s straining the budgets of just about every American family and that’s the soaring cost of higher education,” he added. “Everybody’s touched by this, including your president who had a whole bunch of loans he had to pay off.”