Hillary Clinton wants voters to know she’s just like you. Like you, she rides the NYC subway, and like you, she has struggled with money. Hillary has claimed she and Bill left the White House “dead broke,” and that she paid off her student loan debts through a work program.
As was the case with being a real New Yorker, and being broke, Clinton’s story of paying off student loans may be based more on fiction than truth.
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“I know (student loan forgiveness) works because Bill and I did that,” she told minority students in Mississippi last year. We both borrowed money when we went to law school and we paid it back as a percentage of our income, so I could go to work at the Children’s Defense Fund, not some big law firm that would pay me more. I wanted to do the work I loved…I want everyone to have that chance.”
She repeated that story in Brooklyn on Wednesday, emphasizing that she understood students struggles to pay for college.
The only problem is that the student debt program Clinton referred to wasn’t created until 1989. A report from Alternet pointed out that Clinton attended Yale Law School in the early 1970s.
Yale was also much more affordable back then. The price of tuition when Clinton went to Yale was just $5,000 annually, or $26,700 by 2016 inflation standards, which is still about $20,000 less than what students currently pay.
Like all things with Clinton, the truth is manipulated to fit the current image she’s trying to portray to voters.
