Hillary Clinton speaking in New Hampton.

Hillary Clinton is only a few weeks into her official presidential campaign, however in that time she has managed to be in the midst of making a plan to cut down the student debt crisis in the US. It is very likely that a couple of months need to pass until the plan is ready to be displayed to the public and the camp of Hillary Clinton didn’t want to respond to requests from press, however if you look at her track record we can get a pretty clear picture of her plans. In the battle between borrowers and lenders Hillary was always on the side of borrowers in the past.

The first official campaign stop that Hillary has made last month was at a community college in Iowa where she told the students and the representatives also that she completely supports the plan of President Barrack Obama to make community colleges free. However she added that there is much more work to be done on this matter. “Even if we succeed in making all of the costs associated with college free, there are still many other costs that people must figure out how to pay,” Hillary said. “There are other costs that go with college such as online materials and books.” A day after Iowa, Clinton was at the New Hampshire Technical Institute where she recognized the intimidating costs of college. “It is unreal to expect paying off such great debt easily,” she added. It is clear that she understands the troubles people have. However the question is how can she make college affordable for all people? Besides the free community college access, she also stated that she will support income based repayment, decreasing the overall price of tuitions, giving reliefs that will make it easier to finance federal student loan debt and also developing many new work study programs. This issue is both personal for Hillary and Bill Clinton as they both participated in work study programs while in college.

The Federal government has been striving to help students control their debt and manage it easier, and mostly through programs such as “Pay As You Earn,” which is designed to cap monthly federal student loan payments that go as low as 10 % of a student’s discretionary income. This is a program that can help a lot of grads from not defaulting on their loans, however the problem is spreading the word as many people don’t know about this program. Today only 14% of people who are eligible for this program have taken advantage of it.