Lying about the Past

Candace Owens Lies about her Past to Spread her Anti-College Agenda

Why this matters: Candace Owens constantly brings up her past experience with college and uses it as a springboard to advise others to skip college entirely, oftentimes in favor of “trade school” or some other nonsense.

If she’s going to use her personal experience as an authoritative reference to discourage others from college, then two important things must be true about her experience:

1. It must be reasonably representative of the average person’s experience.

2. It must be true.

If her experience was exceptional, then it wouldn’t make sense to caution others because of it, as the circumstances regarding her education would be avoidable or non-applicable to the average person. If her experience was a lie, then it’s misleading to cite it as a realistic example of what could go wrong.

tl;dr: Candace Owens presents an irreconcilable pattern of facts pertaining to her family and schooling history. She’s either misrepresenting crucial facts about her experience, or she took an unbelievably foolish path through the college system that no one else should reasonably be advised nor expected to follow. Consequently, she (or her family) should assume responsibility for her mistakes and stop blaming the system for her experience with higher education.

A Confusing Fact Pattern:

• Candace claims she grew up in Stamford, Connecticut.

  • The median household income appeared to be around $80k-$90k in the time, or ~$74k for individuals.

  • Candace claims to have grown up in low-income housing in this city, though she doesn’t specify for how many years she lived in said housing.

    • “Owens has said that her early years, many of them spent in low-income housing in Stamford, Connecticut, were “dysfunctional.” Her family moved in with her grandparents when she was nine, and her grandfather Robert became a powerful influence in Owens’s life.“ - The Gospel of Candace Owens - The New Yorker

• Candace claims that she scored well on her state tests.

  • “‘When I grew up, I never ever, ever felt like this. Because I had high test scores, I was in classes with primarily white people … with the exception of one black girl and one black boy, we were the only black kids in our class and I never felt that.’ … In her primary school she was in a mixed class and her best friends were ‘a black girl and a Spanish girl’. After she took the state test, she found herself in a mostly white class.” - Interview with Candace Owens: Trump, Kanye West and me - The Times

• Candace Owens’ family was awarded a $37,500 judgment after her family filed a case against high school students who’d made threats and racist remarks to Candace in high school.

• Candace chose to attend an out-of-state public school, the University of Rhode Island, to major in journalism. She seems to bounce back and forth between claiming she had $100,000 in debt or $150,000 in debt, depending on the conversation. She also claims she dropped out of school after her junior year.

  • July, 2018 Tweet: “I used to dream big because of @mcuban. Back when I had 10 dollars and 100k in student loan debt— he inspired me to embrace failure; to accept every no, on the road to YES."

  • 2019 PragerU Podcast: "I didn't come from a wealthy family, I didn't have a college degree. I started my life $150,000 in student loan debt for falling for this scam of 'you must go to college and take out loans even though you don't really know what you wanna do.'"

    • Additional quote from this show: "I’ve lived on friends couches in roach infested apartments, just trying to survive."

  • April 2020 Tweet: "WOW. I began my life in a roach-infested low-income apartment—sharing a small bedroom with my 2 sisters. I started my career as a young adult with more than 150,000$ of debt. "

  • September 2023 PBD Podcast: "Coming out of college I had 150k in Student Loan Debt. No money from my family."

  • March 2024 Appearance on my Stream: "My school was $35,000 tuition." "Well that's what I paid [$100,000 in student loans]."

• The actual tuition for the University of Rhode Island in 2007 for out-of-state tuition was $21,294. If she paid for full room and board (with food) as well, that’s an additional $8,732, bringing the total to about $30,000.

  • On my stream, Candace claims that she got $8,000 in Pell Grants after stumbling through originally claiming she didn’t have any help filling out the FAFSA. She doesn’t clarify whether this was per year (impossible, as the maximum awarded Pell Grant for the years she was in school was around $5,000) or total (unlikely, if her family was so poor that she was living in low-income housing in roach infested apartments, I imagine she would have qualified for the maximum award for those three years, which comes out to about $16,500).

• This means that the total cost of her education, with incredibly generous assumptions, would have come out to about $75,000.

  • This assumes she was taking out a loan all three years for room, board and food, though I’ve only heard her refer to it as “tuition” and never “room and board” in her interviews and tweets.

  • This assumes she wasn’t working at all during her college years (which is contradicted by her claiming she was working since she was 14 in her PragerU Video).

  • This assumes she never qualified for any additional student aid or scholarships, despite being a black woman graduating high school in low income housing with high test scores, and despite filling out the FAFSA and receiving a Pell Grant.

• Candace claims that she took out loans from Sallie Mae at “criminal interest rates” and approximates the cost of her education at $37.5k/year (though it’s unclear where she gets that number from, as it exceeds even the maximum out of state tuition + room and board (with meal plan) costs for education), implying that she was forced to take private loans instead of subsidized ones. She also claims it took her “many years” to pay back her debt, though paying back over $100,000 in student loan debt in 4.5 years is quite exceptional.

  • March 2024 Tweet: This is legitimately hilarious. My university was about 37,500.00 per a year. Three years would total approximately 112k. I took out student loans with Sallie Mae which had criminal interest rates. I then defaulted on those loans because I was… still broke. It took me many years to climb out of that debt, but I wound up paying back everything I owed—which was over 100k, as I told you. You know you have completely lost a debate when you’ve been reduced to trying to accuse someone of being secretly wealthy in their youth.

• Candace also claims that after quitting school early due to “loan issues” she moved to New York City, began working, and paid off her $150,000 (or $100k?) of student loan debt in 4.5 years while working as an assistant without a college degree and traveling at the same time.

  • “‘So I went to the city [New York] with $8 in my bank account.’

    There she did a quick stint at Vogue ‘before I realised that I was way too cerebral to work in fashion. These girls would be stressed out, like in tears in the closet, because they can’t find a Prada bag.’ So she set her sights on finance. ‘I knew that if I could interview and get in front of someone I could get a job making money, and I wanted to make as much money as possible.’ She got a job as an assistant, and rose quickly, and travelled a lot, she says, though she won’t tell me at which firm, because if she does, reporters will start seeking dirt from her former colleagues. After four and a half years, with her loans paid off, she set out on her own, starting a lifestyle website called Degree180 and then a project called Social Autopsy, which was meant to expose internet trolls.” - Interview with Candace Owens: Trump, Kanye West and me - The Times

This is a rather exceptional fact pattern that doesn’t map on at all to the average college experience in the United States.

• The average college graduate (who borrowed money to graduate) will finish college and attain their bachelor’s with $27,400 in debt. Candace Owens claims to have accumulated $100,000-$150,000 in debt in only three years at a public university.

• It takes the average borrower about 20 years to pay off their student loan debt. Candace Owens did it while traveling, moving to one of the most expensive cities in the world, dropping out of college without attaining her degree, and while defaulting on her loans in a blazing 4.5 years!!!

• Candace simultaneously claims that her family was incredibly poor, yet she apparently wasn’t able to qualify for substantial financial aid or grants. She also claims that her family was incredibly poor, yet she was able to qualify for an absurd amount of private, unsubsidized loans from Sallie Mae, to the tune of over $110,000.

Candace Owens is either completely misrepresenting her college journey, or her experience was so exceptional that it can’t be used as a warning for potential future college students.