2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumIs Hillary's Personal Story About Student Loans a Fabrication?
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/hillarys-personal-story-about-student-loans-fabricationIs Hillary's Personal Story About Student Loans a Fabrication?
by Les Leopold
Hillary Clinton tells this story to struggling students. She told it to minority students in Mississippi in November 2015, and she recently told it again to minority students in Brooklyn.
Her story makes several important points to attract young people who are flocking to Sanders.
First it offers hope that something practical can be done about crushing student loans. Wouldn't it be great if all student debt payments could be reduced to a percentage of income? She argues that is much more realistic than the Sanders free tuition plan.
Second, it suggests humble origins, and therefore combats the troublesome fact that she recently earned as much from one Wall Street speech as the average worker earns in five years. In this story, Hillary, too, had to amass debt just like other financially struggling students. And only by the good fortune of the Yale Law School debt forgiveness program was she able to work her way out of debt with little difficulty. "Everyone should have that chance."
Third, the story allows Hillary to project an image of selfless public service. The forgiveness program spared her from being forced by her loans to work at "some big law firm that would pay me more."
It's a politically potent story that fits neatly together. Too neatly, I think.
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Fact or Fiction?
To me, the odds seem high that Hillary's story is just that, an utter fabrication. In all likelihood, her family had enough income to afford Yale Law School in the early 1970s. At that time, the tuition was well in reach for an upper-middle-class family. (I know several of Hillary's law school classmates from similar backgrounds who accumulated no debt.)
But there's a bigger problem with Hillary's story: The loan forgiveness program she refers to didn't even exist in the early 1970s. Yale Law School literature is quite clear on this:
"Some students dream of jobs in smaller firms, nonprofit organizations, public interest, government service or academia. These are jobs that typically pay less than those at large firms. Yale Law School has pioneered a loan repayment assistance program to allow these students to take their dream jobs without worrying about their student loans.
Established in 1989, the Career Options Assistance Program (COAP) was one of the first loan forgiveness programs of its kind."
1989 is not 1973. Yet doesn't this description sounds similar to the story Hillary tells?
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)And back in the 70's, law school at Yale didn't put you $300K in debt to start with.
HooptieWagon
(17,064 posts)She makes shit up, she's a habitual liar.
Juicy_Bellows
(2,427 posts)She has sold more whoppers to the American public than Burger King.
Tal Vez
(660 posts)Have you checked yet to find out if there really was any kind of Yale Law School debt forgiveness program that preexisted the COAP program? She should be asked if she remembers what floor it was on, etc. And, has she destroyed any of the records (evidence)? Maybe you could write her and ask her about all this.
hollysmom
(5,946 posts)they were certainly more affordable. My state scholarship was for 500 a semester - just what the state college charged - state scholarships were given out like water at a marathon. I won two other tuition scholarships but the commuting fees to NYC and the time it would take to commute kept me from using them. I can[' think of anyone who took out school loans back them, If you parents wanted to help you they took out a second mortgage. It was a different time. There were not really student loans (that I knew of) or equity lines.
I don't know about the south, but I would be surprised if they had things we did not up north. I wanted to live at college, so I took part time jobs to do that. (cheap in NJ, expensive in NYC)
Now she went to Wellesley and Yale, neither cheap schools, maybe they had some loans people could apply for. I had a friend who got a scholarship to Wellesley, she said most of the girls there were on scholarship. My friend was a child of a single mother and got a scholarship that paid for everything including books.
I did not get an advanced degree (which angered my favorite math teacher oy!), so I do not know the finances of that
BlueStateLib
(937 posts)Hoyt
(54,770 posts)done to help people with big student loans. That's what I care about, not how she gets the message across. Folks need to focus on what matters, not this kind of BS.
Press Virginia
(2,329 posts)heavy sniper fire on the way to class...she was ready for Lejeune.
She can't help herself when it comes to not telling the truth
Barack_America
(28,876 posts)Par for the course.
Does she even remember the truth anymore?
BlueStateLib
(937 posts)http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2001/03/27/70s-debt-program-finally-ending/
MyNameGoesHere
(7,638 posts)Too bad you're wrong and no facts to back it yup as one researcher downstream proved.
Baobab
(4,667 posts)He says in the article that he's not 100% sure and he mentions that the program which seems to him to be the one she is talking about only started in the 1980s- I have no idea if she lied or not, but I suspect he's likely right because I did know that she came from a well to do family. Not a poor family.
There is no deception on that, the title of the article basically poses the question and it lays out the facts.
You can ask the author, his email is I am sure easy to find.
I suspect its true because going back to that period, college tuitions were substantially lower than today, and as i said, she did come from a well to do family that likely would have had no problem putting her through Yale law School.
Of the two Clintons, Hillary was the one that came from the somewhat wealthy family, Bill didn't.
So i think its extremely unlikely that Hillary needed to borrow money to any great degree to go to college.
There are a number of areas where I already know she's been dishonest. So one more wouldn't surprise me at all.