Bill Clinton: “No. As a matter of fact, in the campaign, we only talked about making it available as an option. We talked about making…”

“No. As a matter of fact, in the campaign, we only talked about making it available as an option. We talked about making it available for everybody to pay off their loans as a percentage of their income, and then the funding of national service slots will be college graduates. That's all we talked about in the campaign. Now, we're actually going to start funding slots for people before they go to high school. And we think we'll start--we think we'll have 35,000 of them, which is twice as many people as were ever in the Peace Corps in any given year, in addition to those coming out of college. What we don't know, and we may have to modify the funding I asked for from Congress over the next 4 years, but it is impossible to know how many people will choose the service option. So the funding we asked for is based on our best available effort to estimate how many people will choose the service option. All the students will be able to choose to pay their loans back as a percentage of their income immediately. And we think we'll be able to accommodate over the next 4 years, everybody who chooses the service option. We think we will. But we have to build it up a little in the first year or two so we learn how to do it. There has been a pilot project going, as you probably know, under legislation that was sponsored in the previous Congress by, I think, Senator Nunn, Senator Wofford, and others. And we're going to expand it just as quickly as we can, and we're going to do our level-best, once we get the system worked out over the next year or so, to make service available to everybody who wants it. We think their numbers are about right. We think we have funded it about the level of maximum participation for college graduates. But we're adding on pre-college students, which we think is a good thing. This is something I had not planned to do basically until I kept seeing programs like the L.A. Conservation Corps, City Year, programs like the ones the young people are involved in here.”