Despite the hosting university officials being embroiled in an historic affirmative action case in a state where immigration reform is a hot-button issue, President Barack Obama steered clear of controversial race and immigration issues Monday in a rousing speech in Texas meant to advance his administration’s “cradle to career” education agenda as the means to a better economy.

“Education is the economic issue of our time,” Obama said before a sea of Texas Longhorns T-shirt-wearing students Monday at the University of Texas at Austin in a speech titled “Higher Education and the Economy.”

“It’s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have gone to college,” Obama said in the speech, which was viewed in some quarters as a way to include an “official” event in what was otherwise a two-stop fundraising tour in order to get taxpayers to foot the bill.

Before Obama’s speech back in Washington, two officials from the Education Department emphasized the importance of doing more to help Latino students get to and through college over the next decade in order to “educate our way to a better economy” and help reach the Obama Administration’s higher education goal of restoring the United States as the world’s leader in college-degree attainment.

“Now is more important than ever in the Hispanic community,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a telephone conference with reporters, noting that only 11 percent of college students are Hispanic, whereas Hispanics represent roughly 15.5 percent of the U.S. population.

“We think that number is far too low,” Duncan said of the Latino college enrollment rate during the phone conference, in which he was joined by Juan Sepulveda, director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.

Duncan and Sepulveda spoke of the need to do more to “build a culture” of going to college and completing college among the Latino segment of the population.