Hillary Clinton made a pitch Wednesday for young Americans and businesses alike to move to New York in a speech boosting Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to offer tuition-free scholarship for middle-class New Yorkers.
Clinton appeared with Cuomo at an event LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City where he signed into law the Excelsior Scholarship program, which allows students from families that make up to $125,000 per year to qualify to attend college tuition-free at all public universities in New York State.
In his remarks, Cuomo credited Clinton, who served as a U.S. senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, for being the inspiration behind the idea for the tuition-free program. He said during the 2016 presidential campaign, he heard “an outrageously ambitious idea, but an irrefutably smart idea” from candidate Clinton, and that was making college affordable.
Clinton — whose name has surfaced as a potential future candidate again, including for mayor of New York City — boasted that the program is the “fastest way to give working and middle-class families a raise” and urged Americans across the country to migrate to the Empire State.
While she said she hopes New York is the first of many to adopt the tuition-free scholarship model for middle-class Americans, in the meantime New York is the place to be.
“You move to New York, you make a commitment in New York, then you can get an affordable college education,” Clinton said. I think that would be only fair that young people would come here, all over the state, not just to New York City to find the community college that provided the program that they wanted. To find the four-year college in the SUNY system that offered them the best path forward.”
While the program does offer a way around debt for middle-class Americans, there is a stipulation. Students are required to live in New York for the same number of years they received financial assistance or be required to pay the money back.
Clinton said the scholarship program will not only “send a message of hope to countless families” but hopes too that it will “send a message to employers that they want to start making plans to come to New York because New York will provide exactly the kind of workforce that the governor has promised.”
“Paying for college should not defer or destroy dreams, and with this Excelsior Scholarship program, it will not,” she said.
Clinton also took a shot at the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress.
“Now I’m hoping too that the Congress will come to its senses. And will understand we don’t need to be building walls we need to be building bridges,” she said, which seemed to be a subtle shot at President Trump’s idea to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. “And the best bridge to the future is a good education my friends,” she added.
