During a live-streamed #AskHillary interview at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco Monday evening, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the extreme cost of higher education “one of the biggest problems” that our country currently faces.
Clinton made this claim in the immediate wake of reports that she demanded a whopping $275,000 in speaking fees from a public university in New York just last year.
Katie Stantion, vice president of global media for Twitter, conducted the interview, asking questions submitted by Twitter users and staff for Clinton to answer.
One question, posed by the organization Do Something, asked Clinton how she would render college tuition “more affordable and accessible” to America’s youth.
“I think it’s one of the biggest problems we have right now in the country for obvious reasons,” Clinton answered. “One, because too many young people are being priced out of going to college or staying in college. And, two, if they do go and stay, they’re coming out with debt that interferes with their being able to make other choices.”
Though the “Hard Choices” author admitted that some progress has been made to combat student debt, she said more needs to be done to make sure students can pay back what they’ve borrowed to attend college. She even threw in a personal anecdote to make her point, predictably emphasizing her former financial struggles to help her audience forget her current wealth.
“When [Bill and I] were in law school, we both took out loans, we both worked two, three, four jobs,” Hillary detailed. “But when we graduated, we had the opportunity to pay back as a percentage of our income and we both took relatively low-paying jobs.”
Clinton said that allowing more individuals to pay a percentage of their income would allow graduates to more easily manage their debt. She also proposed refinancing some of the student loan debt, an idea already put forth by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of Clinton’s potential challengers for the Democratic nomination for the 2016 presidential race should she decide to run.
“I also believe that college education just costs too much,” Clinton added. “It’s hard to relate the rise in cost to the actual product that has certainly changed somewhat but not so dramatically as to justify those costs, and I think that colleges and universities have to do more to try to keep costs down and have to do more on financial aid so that more people can come to college without having to bear the costs themselves.”
Clinton may have jeopardized her career as a high-priced speech giver by urging colleges to cut costs. Of course, the University of Buffalo was forced to offer up $275,000 to pay Clinton for a one-hour speech in October of 2013, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas has agreed to compensate the former secretary of State $225,000 for the speech she will deliver at a foundation dinner this fall.
It’s ironic that Clinton would both demand that colleges cut costs and make her self extremely costly to them at the same time. In order to follow her advice, America’s universities might just have to forgo Clinton’s expensive talks.
