Did Donald Trump really go to Wharton School of Finance?

Donald Trump told so many lies in his first debate with Kamala Harris that it’s hard to know where to start. CNN determined that the former president made at least 33 fraudulent statements (as opposed to Harris’ single factual error). But was his claim that he attended Wharton School of Finance one of them?

One of the many ways the Vice President successfully pushed Trump’s buttons during the debate was when she called out the inefficacy of his economic plan. “What the Wharton School said is Donald Trump’s plan would actually explode the deficit,” Harris declared, alongside citing experts like Goldman Sachs and Nobel Prize-winning economists as similarly finding Trump’s ideas lacking.

Donald didn’t like that, of course. “I went to the Wharton School of Finance, and many top professors there think my plan is brilliant. It’s a great plan,” he hit back. At this point, though, it’s easier to simply assume everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is a lie and then work backward to figure out if it’s the truth.

So what do we know about Trump’s higher education and was he actually being honest this time?

Did Donald Trump attend Wharton School of Finance?

To put it plainly, yes, Donald Trump did go to Wharton School of Finance. The business school that’s part of the University of Pennsylvania is one of the most prestigious in its field, with many CEOs of the world’s biggest companies counted among its alumni — including Trump’s best pal Leon Elon Musk.

Here are the facts: Trump began his college education in his native New York, attending Fordham University in the Bronx in 1964. He transferred to Wharton two years later, however, and ultimately graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Economics in 1968. What we don’t know is the class of Trump’s degree, as he’s never been forthcoming about his academic performance.

Likewise, it’s been speculated that the Trump family’s sway significantly aided in getting Trump admitted to the school, and his transfer there after first attending Fordham may have been a clever ploy. James Nolan, a former admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post feels that Fred Trump likely pulled some strings to help out his son and that transfer students often had a higher rate of admission anyway.

Even if there was no funny business involved in Trump getting into the school, it is a fact that it was far easier to be admitted into the university back in the 1960s than it is today. A mere 7% of applicants get accepted every year, whereas back in Trump’s day, the acceptance rate was “slightly greater than 40%.”

As for Trump’s claims that many Wharton professors believe he’s got “a great plan,” that’s harder to quantify as nobody’s polled the school’s entire teaching staff. We can say, though, that Harris is absolutely correct that Wharton as a collective body has distanced itself from Trump’s ideas. In 2016, Wharton Magazine published an article criticizing the then-president’s economic policies, labeling them as “Reaganomics 2.0.”

Trump does indeed count Wharton as his alma mater — but a man who’s been declared bankrupt six times and found guilty of financial fraud probably isn’t the school’s favorite graduate.