President Trump: Community College is 13th Grade, Not Real College –Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A tweet from President Trump calls community college 13th grade and asserts it’s not real college and is for dummies.
The Truth:
President Trump didn’t call community college “13th grade” or say that it was “only for dummies.”
That rumor spread in a screen shot of a tweet that allegedly came from the president’s personal twitter handle. The tweet reads: “Community college, call it vocational and technical school. People know what that means. They don’t know what community college means. Maybe call it 13th grade, that’s more like it. Community college makes it sound like it’s real college and it’s not. It’s only for dummys.”
It’s easy to photoshop or manipulate tweets that appear to show politicians saying ignorant or outrageous things. This appears to be one of those cases. The tweet doesn’t appear in the president’s timeline. It’s also absent from the “Politiwoops” archive of deleted political tweets run by ProPublica.
And this tweet is especially misleading because it begins with a quote that actually came from the president. During a March 30, 2018, stop in Pennsylvania, the president said, “I don’t know what that means, a community college. Call it vocational and technical. People know what that means. They don’t know what a community college means.”
Trump also raised eyebrows when he made a similar comment during the “Generation Next” White House forum earlier in the month. He referenced a friend who could fix engines but was “not going to be Einstein academically.” The president continued, “But he’ll never be a student, nor did he want that kind of learning, that kind of whatever you want to call it. So we need vocational schools. Now, they call them, a lot of times, community colleges. I don’t think that’s an accurate definition.”
So, Trump didn’t say that community colleges are like “13th grade” or are for dummies. But he has taken issue with the name “community colleges,” preferring vocational and technical college instead.