Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

The whole point of the loan is to buy time; you don't want to wait for when you have savings to purchase the degree, you want to do it now. If you are not doing it for the job, then why the loan, what's the rush?

If knowledge and prestige is all that matters, then don't take the loan, take the scenic route, get your degree slowly as and when you have the time and money, and one day you will have something to look back at.

But if you are doing it so you can start earning as soon as possible, when you are still young and energetic... then you are doing it for the job, and in that case the degree better be financially worth it.

You have the right to a degree in XYZ... you should NOT have the right to a taxpayer backed grant/aid/loan/whatever to gain said degree unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree.

If this is a fair question to ask students, then it is a fair question to ask the schools as well. They are the ones charging enormous amounts of money to students for this.

This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from taking out enormous loans for it.

I do get that not all education should be purely for economic reasons, but as an autodidact I feel that "learning for the sake of learning" does not need to come with the prices that people are paying for degrees.

(For bachelors degrees): Each year, they will calculate the median earnings 4 years after graduation of graduates of every (Institution, CIP code) tuple. (CIP Code: 6 digit code that identifies a "program"; there are ~2,000).

Then they calculate the median earnings of high school grads in that Institution's state across all jobs.

If the high school grads earn more than the bachelors degree grads for 2 out of the past 3 years, the Feds won't offer student loans for that (Institution, CIP code) tuple.

Incidentally, the IRS already supplies this data in aggregated form to the US Dept. of Ed.

Check it out here: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/

Here is MIT: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166683-Massachusetts...

This and/or making loans dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system. This will pull up the ladder on the younger generations.

We do not teach history or ethics, or much in general to our pipeline welders, but they make bank for their hard labor. Meanwhile our well educated school teachers are paid nearly nothing. Both are needed (although I would argue teachers more so). This is not fundamentally an issue of failing educational institutions (although they may well be lacking), but an issue of societal incentives. The welder is paid by the oil corporation; the teacher by a dwindling percentage of your tax dollars.

We are living in the information age yet we have a crisis of education. We desperately a solution that increases both educational access and quality for everyone regardless of their career path. We need more, better, cheaper education. We need more incentives for an educated populace. This does not achieve that: in fact it aggravates the issue.

The colleges don't have to prove the degree is worth the price paid for it, only that it is better than nothing. If you go to some Ivy League school and rack up $100K debt, you don't have to show that you will earn enough to pay that back; only show that you make more than if you never went to college.

Companies, by requiring college degrees even for the most mundane tasks, simply turned academia into multiple things at once: it saved them money for training their staff (as the majority of "industry standard" knowledge gets taught there), it offloaded the cost to the prospective employees (remember when we were taught "if you are supposed to pay for your job you're getting scammed"?), and most importantly it offloaded all of the risk too. Got ADHD? Any other mental or physical health issue? You likely won't even pass college. Everyone who passed through college already passed the "filter gates" employers want - can cope with stress, likely has some sort of support network if they can't on their own, and doesn't carry baggage that reduces their ability to work compared with their peers.

Oh, and a nice side thing for companies, requiring college degrees saves them from ADA and other anti-discrimination regulation violations. It's well-known that being Black (or otherwise in a minority) results in markedly lower chances of finishing with a degree, having children results in lower chances, living in poverty results in lower chances, the list goes on and on. Requiring a college degree is a very easy proxy to say "I want a workplace that's as male, white and rich-frat-boy-ish as possible".

> Most traditional, four-year bachelor programs fare well, with roughly 1% failing the earnings test. When these programs do fail, it's often in areas like theater, music and studio art.

My knee jerk reaction was to suspect some kind of academic purge, but this honestly seems to mostly affect schools that were kinda scammy to begin with.

In practice, I could also see this resulting in people double majoring in art if they were truly passionate

Could also look the other way around: if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?

The way student debt is (mis)managed is a different issue.

I don't really see why some no name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing. They honestly have more of a right to do so.

Many colleges heavily advertise how it will help your career prospects. Yet when called out on the less than rosy outcomes they retreat to a position of oh it isn't about career at all.

Wouldn't this punish a huge number of students who struggle academically, by comparing them against better-achievers who simply skipped school?

The two populations being compared are entirely different for a lot of schools. Just because the average student skipping college does better than the average student attending a particular college, that doesn't mean the average one that attended college would've done as well as the average one that skipped.

The cycle breaks if the university suddenly produces a group of people that cannot contribute in any meaningful way back. In that case it’s totally fair to ask where did we go wrong and how can we fix it and get back on track rather than trying to keep the broken system

Both the colleges letting their costs get out of control to the control to open the door to this kind of rule and that the current admin thinks this is what secondary education is about. See if it goes to actually rule implementation or if its just posturing.

Oh, we'll just lower requirements for teachers so they don't need a degree...ok [1]

[1] https://www.k12dive.com/news/florida-to-let-veterans-spouses...

If you wanted to tackle the problems of education you'd start by improving our failing highschools and then ensuring higher education is free and easily accessible so that the earnings gulf isn't as wide.

of course it would be better to make college free, or give everyone zero interest federal loans that can be paid off with normal taxes and auto deferred until you start making serious money.

humanities should probably by funded with a different program anyway. ask a panel of experts how many graduates we need then offer X scholarships a year that upgrade to a full ride if your family is low income. allocate them with something like a national lottery where school districts nominate some amount of students based on their population.

A better criteria would be, does the increase in salary that the degree program provides allow the student to pay off the cost of the degree in ten years (the length of the standard repayment plan).

It’s not really a big deal if a degree didn’t increase your earnings, provided your school was cheap. If your degree is worthless AND your school was expensive though, the results can be catastrophic.

I'm generally against banning things like smoking and gambling but I am absolutely for putting giant warning labels on those things.

Adults which means anyone over 18 should know the risks and what they are signing up for.

The recent policy is also reinstating loan limits for graduate studies that were dropped in the 80s: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/01/nx-s1-5876467/student-loans-d...

Whether public or private it seems that the correct price that all systems asymptotically approach is exactly infinity.

Or, if you use bankruptcy to rid yourself of the loans, you also dismiss any claim of degree related to the bankrupted schools you attended.

That would he a great way to balance bankruptcy with education scams. And yeah, most schools are scammy.

No education can guarantee you a certain income especially when there is a gap between start and graduation.

Before AI a degree in computer science was an advantage now management thinks is obsolete.

This seems of a way to definance and devalue education

A quick summary: the modern university is really a "multiversity", combining research, trade school, broad "liberal arts" education, and residential coming-of-age in one organization. The author argues this model is finished, and the pieces should be separated. I don't know if the author is correct, but I think the idea that the university is many things is important to recognize for this discussion (and just about every discussion around universities).

This law, in sense, wants to distinguish the trade school and general education parts of the university (though I suspect it more aimed at owning the libs than anything else).

Making art and humanities programs demonstrate some kind of pecuniary benefit is disgusting and myopic. My wife pursued English because she loves writing. She's earned about 0 dollars from that degree because she's home with our kids. And that's OK! Our lives are so much richer because of her degree—as well as the classes I took from the English department. So we should penalize the humanities because it merely makes people better thinkers and doesn't have as high of an ROI as an MBA? Yuck!

(EDIT: the article does mention that this bar is low—so not too bad—but the fact that this is a metric and criteria in the first place opens this up to abuse in the near future.)

I get that it's intended to cut down on ballooning tuition and fees, but *this is not the right way to do that.* (Actually, if we eliminated half the administration, I wonder how much we could cut costs…)

An atrocious way to take public funds and transfer them to private institutions. These kinds of things work so long as our economy is growing, but this kind of extractive behaviour will hurt us if we can't find the next great thing the next time.

Trump himself took advantage of this by creating Trump university which was a for-profit degree mill.

All of those “schools” needs to be wiped off the map and hopefully get replaced by schools that show real value.

A lot of my peers fell behind financially after graduation, struggled to find work relevant to their interests, and then concluded that they needed a master’s degree to become competitive. But in many cases the real problem was not that they lacked another credential or the right credential. They were aimless, had no clear professional direction, and were using more school to postpone dealing with that. They got into $200-300k CAD of debt because Canadian universities are built to enroll at scale and no real meaningful filter exists to weed out people who have no business going down this path. [2]

Universities encourage this because they want to have it both ways. They market the degree as a path to professional opportunity, admit at enormous scale, and charge enough to sustain constantly growing faculties (with the majority of those costs being borne by the public ledger). Then, when graduates struggle, they retreat to “education was never about earnings” and “you learned lots of useful soft skills that employers want, it's your fault for not marketing them better.”

An arts degree should at least certify some meaningful level of writing ability, judgment, discipline, and intellectual competence. In my experience, the same credential was awarded to excellent students and to people who could barely construct an argument. Some of the dumbest arguments I heard during my degree were in fourth-year seminar courses.

Anecdotally, most of the international students I knew were very capable and competent, which made sense given how much they were paying to be there (some families went into extreme debt by Global South standards to get them there).

Meanwhile, the domestic admissions system felt largely non-selective and seemed designed around educating as many people as possible. That may be a defensible public policy goal, but it also means the credential itself becomes a pretty weak signal and a lot of people were never there for educational enrichment or to pursue Liberal Arts as a meaningful field, but because their parents made them - and they thought they must have a degree to be successful because people without degrees are surely crude barbarians.

Earnings are a crude metric, but “trust us, they became better thinkers” is not accountability. And funneling underemployed graduates into master’s programs and aimless paths are not a solution.

Arts educations should be gated, not necessarily based on funds, either with difficult trials to prove competency or real life experience. For example, theatre programs should admit people with existing experience in background acting and community theatre. North America can adopt 3 year degrees similar to Europe, make the breadth year optional, and actually weed out the incompetent by the first year if we insist on having zero admission standards amidst rising grade inflation. (NC programs produce credible credential signals despite being open admission).

[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/1896-who-pays-universit...

[2] The sad irony is that pretty much everyone I know (n=5) who took 2+ years between graduating high school and starting post-secondary got jobs or snazzy PhD offers shortly after graduating post-secondary, on top of having to pay nothing for tuition because parental contributions aren't expected for "independent" students for Canadian student aid. I think making more students discover themselves in the real world before letting them do post-secondary could genuinely yield better results in way-finding and independence that's critical for post-grad outcomes.

Although, unfortunately, I suspect that this will be gamed by things like “this is super unique diploma” and there are no pros on market yet. Rotate that every 5 years and voila. I’m sure that every smart people are already thinking about schemes much more elaborate

When evaluating whether public money is well spent on education it must be more important how valuable it is to the public, not what the price for the work is to the individuals.

I like the "what if these workers stopped today" test:

Pick a profession. For example pick from 'trader', 'dentist', 'cleaner', 'sales person' or 'nurse'. Then imagine that all people in that profession stop working today.

How bad would it be for society? Is it better or worse than some other profession? Compare this to how well-payed the profession is.

I think this is a much better test for value to society than looking at what people get payed.

For example, I think it would be much worse if all nurses stop working than if all bankers stop working. Yet bankers tend to get paid more.

Government spends all kinds of money that doesn't have an immediate and obvious RoI and often in ways that people are fine with (the military, the massive corruption of the current US executive branch, brutal immigration enforcement). Yet, letting people better their lives in the ways they want to gets people here riled up.

The whole system needs reworking, because capitalism, but there's no reason the US can't have universal university education, just like there's no reason we can't have universal health care, other than the complete lack of willpower and the complete capitulation to capital.

This is not good. This is a transparent political attack on universities and programs perceived as hostile by an administration and political party that has spent the years attacking higher education. "I love the uneducated", indeed. They have attacked science within the government - from the CDC through the EPA. And just last week they were taking down governmental advice on how to conserve energy during a heatwave because they didn't want to support a political opponent who had the audacity to give appropriate advice that matched the federal guidance. If you're taking this action at face value, I have a bridge to sell you. 10 million dollars, you get the Ben Franklin Bridge! I'll mail you a certificate and everything. I digress...

But let's go ahead and look at the merits of the program and what government should be doing in terms of education. Here's the announcement: https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of...

> If a program fails to show at least this modest financial return on investment for its graduates in two out of three consecutive award years, it will lose eligibility to participate in the federal Direct Loan program.

I saw some other comments that seemed to have a misunderstanding here. This 3 year period is about evaluation of the program, not graduates earnings in the 3 years after graduation. The evaluation in any year could be "20 year earnings outlook", for example, but is not specified here. The proposed rule is here: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/earnings-and-accountabilit...

Claude summary of the actual test: "When earnings are measured for an individual cohort:

The Department looks at median earnings in the fourth tax year following program completion (i.e., graduates are given a few years to enter the workforce before their earnings count). Only people who were working (not enrolled in school) during that measurement year are included.

Cohort period / averaging across years:

For small programs, the Department doesn't rely on a single graduating class — it aggregates completers across multiple years into a single "cohort period" to get a large enough sample and to smooth out one anomalous year (e.g., a COVID-affected earnings year) from swinging the result."

But we have a deeper problem here - well, a couple: 1) education is not just about employment and 2) the design of our education system, and how it's funded, is absolutely insane and fucked up for a plethora of reasons. We don't want a culturally bankrupt society. The examples used by the administration are silly (cosmetology, really? I've never heard of a college offering that to begin with). As noted, only 1% of bachelor's programs are worse off than high school anyway. Those philosophy grads actually do really well financially (I'm one of them!), but so do the English majors. The more artsy of the arts are where there's no financial future? Yeah, maybe those need to be cheaper programs. But in reality, it means that rich kids get to study and practice art and the rest of society has to actually work for a living. That's basically how things have been for 2000 years.

Now on to the economics around American universities. The loan issue has been covered elsewhere in the comments. Yes, it's fucking nuts to not allow loans to be discharged, and this has been a huge contributor to the rising costs of education. I may come back after coffee and drop a few other sources here, but maybe some of you can do that instead. But it's not the only contributor: the establishment of a degree as a gate to prevent employment is another. Two more: universities felt the need to compete on lifestyle to woo students (not employment) and finally, the way that bureaucracies tend to continuously grow when they have no natural predators. All of these have contributed to the growing cost of higher education in the US (and I'm sure there's more), but those are the big ones. I think we do need to push on universities. But I think we do that with cheaper universities, with online programs, and with free, federally funded education for fields that are projected to have growth. The total cost to fully fund higher education is about 10% of our yearly military budget: https://educationdata.org/how-much-would-free-college-cost - maybe I'm crazy, but that seems like a great deal to not saddle our best, brightest, and youngest people with a ton of debt.

Unfortunately this rule is going to add more administrative overhead while only eliminating 1% of degree choices. People will still attack the philosophy degrees even if those graduates make far above average income. The administration and anti-education crowd will continue to attack critical thinking, and they'll focus on those majors most likely to create people who oppose them (biology, chemistry, other sciences, humanities, anything outside of business).

To any students out there, do yourself a favor: go to community college, do online courses for a degree and masters, do anything you can to avoid paying $50,000+ a year to a university. The "experience" is just summer camp for almost-adults. Focus on your knowledge. Especially with AI having arrived, make conservative financial decisions.

I don't personally think that efficiency should be the primary concern of colleges, but it should be a concern, and it just plain hasn't been for ages. And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students. "You can't complain about being require to take a 100-level history course because our job is to turn out renaissance scholars who can debate philosophy at cocktail parties before going to work doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with that."

All the while, those additional credit hours cost students a shitload of money and debt and take focus away from their actual fields of study.

Colleges and universities need a kick up the ass to make them actually give a shit about outcomes for their students. I'm not going to cry that they're getting one.