Hillary Clinton, the heavy favorite among Democrats running for president, plans to announce key planks of her higher-education platform on Monday at an event in New Hampshire,
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Hillary Clinton, the heavy favorite among Democrats running for president, plans to announce key planks of her higher-education platform on Monday at an event in New Hampshire, Politico reports. When she does so, student-loan reform will be the dominant theme.
That’s not a surprise. The specter of student-loan debt has hovered over the early stages of the Democratic campaign, as The Chronicle’s Kelly Field reported in June. Both of Mrs. Clinton’s challengers for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Martin O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland, have proposed ways to make college “debt-free” (and, in Mr. Sanders’s case, to make public colleges tuition-free):
The concept has obvious political appeal: It resonates with Millennials, a key voting bloc for Democrats. And it appeals to middle-class parents, who are increasingly anxious about the cost of college. If the concept makes it to the Democratic platform, it would be one of the boldest higher-education proposals that the party has offered in years.
We’ll learn more about the specifics of Mrs. Clinton’s plan on Monday. But according to Politico, her proposal will include “a federal-state partnership to increase funding for public colleges,” “an incentive system for states to increase their investments in higher education,” and “a proposal aimed at easing the financial burden for students who attend historically black colleges.”
Those details may be new, but Mrs. Clinton’s focus on student-loan debt and college affordability is not. At an April campaign stop in Iowa, she backed President Obama’s proposal to make community college free and said college should be “affordable and open for everybody willing to work for it.”
When Mrs. Clinton first ran for president, in 2008, her plan to deal with the “student-loan crisis” was a centerpiece of her higher-education agenda. And as a senator from New York, she served for eight years on the education committee, during which she pushed for a “Student Borrower Bill of Rights.” Portions of that proposal eventually made it into law. As she told The Chronicle in a 2007 interview:
Too many borrowers around the country are overly burdened or treated unfairly as they repay their student loans. … The burden of student-loan debt alone can put people in economic handcuffs and force them out of important but low-paying professions, such as social workers, teachers, and police officers.
Mrs. Clinton has not abandoned that concept. According to the Politico report, her advisers are now weighing whether to draft another bill of rights for student-loan borrowers.
For more on the candidate’s track record on education, read this roundup by Kelly Field.
