For those of you who missed the State of the Union last night, we picked out a few major initiatives or ideas that we saw as uniquely relevant to our generation.

• First, President Obama proposed a measure to halt student loan interest rates from doubling for about 8 million students starting July 1st, 2012.  This is big.  Doubling student loan interest rates would add significantly to the crushing debt today’s students face when they leave campus.  The President’s proposal to stop that interest rate increase would bring relief to millions of borrowers.

If Washington does not act, borrowers who take out new student loans for the 2012-2013 academic year will see an increase in undergraduate subsidized Stafford loan interest rates from 3.4% to 6.8%.  The maximum subsidized Stafford loan is $23,000 for undergraduates, so doubling the interest rate would translate into thousands of dollars in extra payments over the 10 or 20-year life of a loan.

• The President also discussed the importance of connecting education to jobs, filling the job openings that remain vacant due to a skills gap.  With millions of young adults struggling in this tough economy, it’s shocking that so many jobs are left unfilled.

Young Invincibles took action on this issue as recently as yesterday, when we joined with the American School Counselor Association to release the Skills That Work Toolkit and website, which starts to address that gap through better information.  The Toolkit helps young adults making career and education choices by providing state specific facts about growing occupations in their state, which college majors have lower unemployment rates, and the unemployment rates for people with various levels of education.  It helps to provide the information needed to make more informed decisions about the future.

• The President put colleges and universities on notice, asking them to take on the issue of the rising cost of college or risk losing taxpayer dollars.  Decreases in state appropriations are the leading causes of skyrocketing tuition across states.  Spurring action on the state and college level is certainly a big part of the solution needed to making college affordable again.

Of course, there was much more discussed last night – mortgage policy, investments in infrastructure, tax issues and immigration reform, to name a few.  You can check out the whole speech here.