President Joe Biden faced scrutiny over his claim of being the first person in his family to attend college, which he repeated during the launching of his latest student loan debt relief initiative at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin.
Despite Biden’s assertion, historical records and previous statements doubt its accuracy. In 1987, during a plagiarism scandal that rocked his presidential campaign, Biden acknowledged to The New York Times that members of his mother’s family, the Finnegans, had attended college.
Joe Biden (Credits: CNN)
Census records revealed that Biden’s father had attended Johns Hopkins University for one year, as the York Daily Record reported in 2020. Additionally, a 1941 wedding announcement in the Scranton Tribune indicated that Biden’s father “attended Johns Hopkins University.”
Further complicating the narrative, Biden has previously spoken about his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, who attended and played football at Santa Clara College in California. During a 2016 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, Biden humorously referred to his grandfather’s college experience.
Joe Biden (Credits: The White House)
The discrepancy between Biden’s recent claim and historical records prompted criticism. Greg Price, communications director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, highlighted Biden’s grandfather’s college football background in a post on X.
Responding to the scrutiny, a White House spokesman maintained that President Biden is proud to be the first in the Biden family to graduate college, implying that Biden’s previous acknowledgment of his family members’ college attendance did not contradict this assertion.
