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

• b3ing 4mo ago
  With all the layoffs I wonder how that will turn out
• quadrifoliate 4mo ago
  Hopefully this will revamp the educational system in such a way that the pejoratively named "trade schools" can confer bachelor's degrees on their graduates as well. 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.
  • delichon 4mo ago
    A baccalaureate is an academic degree, which is not what trade employers are looking for. They want certifications and licenses.
    • bluefirebrand 4mo ago
      They usually need their employees to have certifications and licenses, by law.
    • quadrifoliate 4mo ago
      Licensing and degrees are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of engineers take licensing exams (CS degree holders are a large exception).
  • tbrownaw 4mo ago
    > pejoratively named "trade schools" That's an accurate name, and only seems pejorative if you see learning a trade as lesser than studying academics. > name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing This misunderstands what the different kinds of credentials are.
    • quadrifoliate 4mo ago
      You're hiding behind semantics. Why should there be a difference in the degree being conferred at all? And if so, why not split off the departments that confer degrees with a low-earning potential and call them "entertainment schools" or something?
      • tbrownaw 4mo ago
        > Why should there be a difference in the degree being conferred at all? You are asking why there "should" be a difference between a CCNA cert and a Computer Science degree. That difference isn't a "should" thing, it's an "is" thing. They are fundamentally different. > why not split off the departments that confer degrees with a low-earning potential Earning potential is unrelated to the distinction between trade certification vs academic degrees.
      • fc417fc802 4mo ago
        Yeah I can't wait for the opportunity for those perjoratively named "community" colleges to be able to award MDs and JDs in whatever fields they teach. Maybe also licenses while we're at it. I'd love to be a licensed physicist with an MD in math. Terms have meanings and they matter, even if you don't choose to bother to understand them.
  • dyauspitr 4mo ago
    What’s pejorative about the term trade school? Also the difference is a bachelors degree is conferred to people that have had a well rounded education, not a 6 month course on a highly specific niche.
    • userbinator 4mo ago
      I think "trade school" is only a pejorative for those who are already fully immersed in the echo-chamber of academia.
  • mistercheph 4mo ago
    Most of higher ed in the US are not education, they are trade schools for white collar work.
• reenorap 4mo ago
  This is wonderful. Hopefully this is an extinction level event for all of the toxic degree factories that were created just to take advantage of the non-dischargeable student loans. US tuition almost tripled in the last 15 years but the quality of education didn’t triple. 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.
  • delichon 4mo ago
    TrumpU was never eligible for federal funds of any kind, including students loans, as it never sought accreditation.
  • pessimizer 4mo ago
    It was not a degree mill, it was a stupid real estate seminar scam like dozens of others. It's even exaggerating to call it a scam - it preyed on people who thought that Trump knew something about real estate that he could teach, and they pretty much got what they paid for (the wisdom of a known real estate failure who instead decided to become a brand.)
• amazingamazing 4mo ago
  Easy, make non college folks worse off.
• EPWN3D 4mo ago
  Holy shit this is a great idea. I get the complaints about the arts, but colleges have enjoyed essentially unlimited patience for larding up their programs with extra fees, bullshit credit requirements, and more, for decades. 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.
  • ashton314 4mo ago
    > "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. This is a straw-man. The purpose is not to turn people into renaissance scholars. It's to inculcate appreciation for what makes life worth living. An educated populace is also a requirement for a healthy democracy. Everyone ought to know some history at a minimum.
    • fwipsy 4mo ago
      This is also a straw-man. You don't just need to establish that students should learn history, literature, etc -- you need to establish that 12 years of that is not enough, and they need to take an additional 4 years at a much higher cost. But why stop at 16 years? Why not 20 or 30 years? Clearly there are diminishing marginal returns. At some point you should trust students who are motivated to learn to continue their studies independently, rather than tacking it on as a massively expensive additional requirement to a vocational degree.
• hankbond 4mo ago
  I feel like I have not really heard a compelling reason why student debt should not be dischargeable thru bankruptcy like (afaik) all other forms of debt. I am curious what the ramifications would be if higher education institutions had to (in some form) co-sign the debt being issued. 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.
  • throw2ih020 4mo ago
    What would stop graduates from declaring bankruptcy early in their careers to discharge their debt, before they use their education to build a lifetime of earnings and assets?
    • bee_rider 4mo ago
      Bankruptcy is still inconvenient. But mostly, people would be less able to get loans and then colleges would get to pick between reducing prices or having only a few rich students.
    • AngryData 4mo ago
      Whats to stop people in their 20s now taking out tons of credit then declaring bankruptcy without the college?
      • throw2ih020 4mo ago
        Credit limits on the credit cards they can apply for. Good luck getting a limit higher than a few grand at 20 years old on your own.
  • chacha102 4mo ago
    I'm all for "learning for the sake of learning", but the federal government doesn't need to subsidize it. Losing federal aid is not the same as not permitting colleges to run the programs at all. Supply/demand is still alive and well.
• galkk 4mo ago
  This is great. Those bullshit degrees are example of externalising costs and capturing profits. 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
• dataflow 4mo ago
  > If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers 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.
  • quadrifoliate 4mo ago
    > Wouldn't this punish a huge number of students who struggle academically, by comparing them against better-achievers who simply skipped school? Why would it not just compare them to the average person who skips school, which can be a combination of better and worse achievers? Is there some part I'm missing where the academically struggling are selectively compared to elite school-skippers?
    • tbrownaw 4mo ago
      I read the parent comment as claiming that some colleges select student bodies that are on average worse than the average of people who don't go to college at all.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
  • nashashmi 4mo ago
    It would definitely punish hosting degree programs that have poor career prospects and outcomes.
  • bruce511 4mo ago
    It's much more complicated than that. >> If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, Lots of things affect earnings. Obviously education is one of them, but it's not the only one. Location, economic environment, social status, personal network - all are factors. In other words comparing unequal things leads to unequal results. For example, a first-generation college attendee gets a solid job working at a non-profit helping others. Someone else in the same town goes straight into Dad's profitable factory as a manager. Of course those might be outliers. We can use statistics to smooth things. But equally we can use statistics to show anything we want. Yes, there are lots of really crap colleges. There are colleges that specialize in nonsense degrees in useless subjects. (English Poetry you say? Hah. Poets never made any money...) But equally there are lots of community colleges, taking in marginal students, giving them opportunities where others won't. Some, maybe most, of those students won't make it. But some will. The effect of a rule like this is that colleges are forced to game the system. To exclude those who might fail. To reduce social mobility. A cynic might even suggest this is the real goal of the rule to begin with.
• user3939382 4mo ago
  Clock hour schools have been held to this standard forever. It’s called gainful employment. It was always bullshit that credit hour schools didn’t have this standard, as if it was 1930 and colleges were here to help us think thoughts rather than as part of the jobs pipeline.
• ashton314 4mo ago
  This is not great. The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job. That's certainly a nice side-effect and I hope that all my students will be able to support themselves through good employment. The university is there to educate you, not train you. It's to turn you into a better thinker, a better person, and someone more capable of living well. 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…)
  • fwipsy 4mo ago
    I agree with the value of studying arts, social sciences, etc. But why should taxpayers cover that? There are lots of online courses which could provide the same education for free. Community colleges also show that it's possible to provide a decent in-person education at a fraction of the cost of major universities. If we could get tuition under control, then federal tuition assistance would be fine, but also hardly necessary. Federal tuition assistance creates a perverse incentive.
    • RandomLensman 4mo ago
      Could also reverse it: Why should tax payers cover things that pay off anyway.
      • fwipsy 4mo ago
        Individuals may rationally avoid the downside risk of a college degree, even if the expected value is positive. As a toy example, suppose college costs $200k and increases lifetime earnings by $2m 90% of the time, or by $0 10% of the time. As a high school grad, I'm not sure I would take those odds; $200k of debt could ruin my life. But the government may prefer that everyone take this gamble, because most individuals will benefit and also it will pay for itself in increased tax revenue, etc. I'm not sure how well this maps to reality, and maybe you're right-- maybe the government should only offer loans, and only to students who have a high probability of paying them off. But I still feel that this is a step in the right direction.
• stevenalowe 4mo ago
  I'm all for informed consent - publish the data - but leave the choice to the individual. The goal of education is self-improvement, not necessarily/only money. The way student debt is (mis)managed is a different issue.
  • anon291 4mo ago
    I agree with you on the goal of education. But whats the goal of government education subsidies?
    • theahura 4mo ago
      > whats the goal of government education subsidies a more educated populace is a public and civic good on its own terms. Public funding for education is maybe partially for economic returns, but is mostly because education is a necessary part of a functioning democracy and a necessary part of living a good fulfilling life
      • anon291 4mo ago
        Shifting the goalposts. For most of american history a high school education was considered sufficient to be part of a functioning democracy. If a music education (or whatever) is required to be part of democracy, then everyone should have it.
        • theahura 4mo ago
          Education isn't a binary, so I'm not sure why we should arbitrarily draw the line at highschool as we become richer as a nation
          • anon291 4mo ago
            Because high school is what we fully fund as a nation
      • tbrownaw 4mo ago
• theahura 4mo ago
  imo this is pants on head backwards. The whole problem with the current university system is that it has become exclusively a credentialing system that everyone uses to justify higher salaries. We’ve completely left the education part of it by the wayside…except for the liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn! This rule is just encoding the existing tulip mania into federal law directly, by making it clear that the ONLY reason one goes to school is for future $$$
  • fc417fc802 4mo ago
    Still it would seem to make some amount of sense for federal aid to be restricted to economically advantageous persuits, no? Doesn't mean that's the only thing institutions can offer nor do I necessarily think it's the best way to improve the status quo.
    • usrnm 4mo ago
      On the contrary, who else is going to fund fundamental research that is not immediately useful? Stuff that prints money will have no problem finding funding, looking at the greater picture is exactly what the government is supposed to do
      • fc417fc802 4mo ago
        We aren't talking about fundamental research here (NIH, NSF, et al) we're talking primarily about students pursuing bachelor's. At least IIUC.
        • usrnm 4mo ago
          You need a steady supply of new grads to keep the research going. How many exactly is a different question, of course
          • sgerenser 4mo ago
            How much of these new grad researchers have undergrad degrees in music vs. science or math? I’d suspect there’s very few of the former, and even then they got the position despite their music degree not because of it.
• CircuitSeuss 4mo ago
  Gut feeling here is that this is going to result in significantly lower higher ed enrollment, and therefore a less educated populace. 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.
  • 01100011 4mo ago
    > Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system Are we sure about this or is federal aid one of the reasons education is so expensive?
    • WalterBright 4mo ago
      The more it's subsidized, the more it costs. I don't think there's any surprise there.
    • CircuitSeuss 4mo ago
      If that were true, wouldn’t we be better served by auditing the finances of these universities and imposing caps on university profits based on operating expenses?
      • yorwba 4mo ago
        The problem is not that universities have high profits, but that they have high operating expenses.
• janalsncm 4mo ago
  > But this new test, known as "do no harm," raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money? 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.
  • frognumber 4mo ago
    I think the corollary is about taxpayer accountability. It's easy to make the argument: "If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness." That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industrial policy, it's about cold, hard economics. One step more complex -- but equally high ROI -- is towards having a functioning democracy. That's economics, but a bit more squishy. Investing in the arts, humanities, and music is a good thing as well. However, that's a very different bucket of money. I wouldn't lump it in with the former two.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • eastbound 4mo ago
      > It's easy to make the argument: And it is false. Those are truthisms, except at one point, college can destroy people’s lives. College can teach people wrong things. College can misdirect people from being about to contribute to the economy and redirect them towards the political goals of the teachers, especially when those don’t derive revenue from their contribution to the economy. College can also misdirect people who would have been happier and more useful with immediate work. There goes my demonstration: College can be harmful to society, it’s subjective to judge when the threshold was crossed. For my opinion, it was crossed in 2013 through politicization.
    • collinmcnulty 4mo ago
• whatever1 4mo ago
  Everyone seeks education, healthcare, retirement. Whether public or private it seems that the correct price that all systems asymptotically approach is exactly infinity.
• LoveMortuus 4mo ago
  Isn’t this already a solved problem with models that are used in various countries in the EU? Where the education is financed through taxes, thus you don’t pay anything up front, but keep paying for it for the rest of your life.
  • left-struck 4mo ago
    In Australia we have interest free loans, I believe they are issued by the government. You are only required to pay it back if you earn over a certain amount per year, in which case it’s like an extra tax that lasts until the loan is paid back or you earn less than the threshold again. It’s not perfect but it’s a good starting point.
  • wahern 4mo ago
    Room & board constitutes 1/2 - 2/3 of the cost of undergraduate school. Even in European countries with free tuition (and that's not as common as you think) students still often must take out loans for living costs. With financial aid the typical American student ends up financially similarly situated to their European counterparts. The problem of college affordability is arguably another dimension of the housing crisis. You can look at the numbers yourself. Yet oddly I've never seen this pointed out or discussed, not in the media or anywhere else. In principle an easy way to lower the cost of college would be for public universities to invest in building more subsidized or free dormitories. The problem is that most of the popular coastal universities are in areas where development is absurdly expensive and contentious, even for government.
  • wqaatwt 4mo ago
    England has a reasonably fair system where tuition fees are fixed and the loan functions more of like an additional tax only for university graduates (i.e. min income limit, low interest, etc.)
    • jltsiren 4mo ago
      At least a decade ago the system was anything but fair. The income threshold for repayment was low, while the interest rate was very high. At that point, the expectation was that those who got an average job after graduation would pay an extra 10% income tax for 30 years, after which the debt would be forgiven. Those with good jobs would pay off the debt quickly enough, and they would pay much less overall for their education.
• Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
  As a European, both the idea of taking a loan for a useless degree and the idea of considering this loan you took out of your own free will as an adult as some kind of evil and malicious thing you shouldn‘t have to pay back are extremely bizarre to me.
• arjie 4mo ago
  There are many programs that exploit credentialism to funnel public money into highly endowed universities. People leave with Bachelors degrees, Masters degrees, and even PhDs in fields that have no purpose but to serve the student as a crop to extract money from the government for. This kind of structure where the student has learned so little that no one finds their extra credentials worth the slightest wage premium is exploitative of students, certainly, but it also has knock-on effects as these under-educated over-credentialed people are then forced to request student loan waivers. 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.
• cco 4mo ago
  So we're going to start paying teachers more so they qualify, right? Right? 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-teach-without-bachelors-degree/627965/ https://www.k12dive.com/news/florida-to-let-veterans-spouses...
• roughly 4mo ago
  Thank god the economy rewards everything we consider valuable with appropriate monetary compensation.
• greyb 4mo ago
  I’m an arts graduate from a well-ranked public Canadian university where domestic/in-state students are heavily subsidized by public funds (domestic students pay only 20-30% of the real cost of enrollment[1]), and I’m probably more sympathetic to this rule than a lot of people in this thread. 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-university-education 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.
• RandomLensman 4mo ago
  What if it takes decades or centuries to pay off for society and perhaps never for the individual (in strictly monetary terms)? How should these things be funded? Could also look the other way around: if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?
  • mishellaneous 4mo ago
    > if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it? i believe the idea is that when someone is educated, it's not themselves alone that benefits from it, but rather everyone else around them. thus the interest in funding the education of other people. > What if it takes decades or centuries to pay off for society and perhaps never for the individual (in strictly monetary terms)? How should these things be funded? i'd look into how other things having such characteristics are funded. for example, research. a lot of research is indeed funded by companies because even though, say, "the cure for cancer" may be 40 years into the future, they do make money off of the incremental improvements along the way. what about more fundamental research? like, particle physics. or, whoever funded the research that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA, what were they thinking? i haven't read a lot about it actually, but i get the idea that they were simply some forward/long-term thinking people. ... overall, i think these are good questions. the kind of questions people with a (ideal) humanities education should be more capable of answering (mine is lacking...)
• stcg 4mo ago
  Yet another case of mistaking price for value. 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.
  • burnt-resistor 4mo ago
    Fascists and neoliberals don't understand or appreciate academic curiosity, art, history, philosophy, or electives because they value quick income maximization through modern undergraduate degree mills (most consumer-first universities these days) to the exclusion of all else.
  • dml2135 4mo ago
    Correct me if I’m wrong, but it actually looks like this rule does not take the price of the degree into account at all.
• monster_truck 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• tancop 4mo ago
  make it 7 years instead of 3 and count median student debt as a factor. that would remove the obvious flaws. 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.
• ryzvonusef 4mo ago
  The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job... but the purpose of a college LOAN is 100% a job, and it's very important to differentiate between the two. 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.
  • jclulow 4mo ago
    I mean, says you? We live in a society and to some extent we decide what that means. I believe many countries outside the US have heavily subsidised loans or cost deferment mechanisms, or just outright government funding for school. Certainly in Australia you essentially don't have to pay back your HECS debt if you don't end up with a salary of sufficient magnitude, and then the rate at which you pay it back is scaled to what you earn.
    • reactordev 4mo ago
      In the US, college is considered a privilege for those who can afford it or are poor enough to be granted it from poorly designed taxpayer funds. Then we set the bar for hiring to requiring a degree making it so that if you want anything above minimum wage, you’re going to have to get a degree. This is how the predatory lending prior to 2008 started with student loan debt. Glad to see that 20 years hasn’t taught us anything. Other countries where University and Education are rights or are provided via better taxpayer systems don’t understand the pure chaos the US system is.
      • 4mo ago
• noelwelsh 4mo ago
  This blog post is very relevant to the discussion: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiversity-is-finished https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiversity-is-finis... 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).
• amclennon 4mo ago
  > But more than 800,000 students attend a program that would likely fail the measure, according to department data. Roughly half of those students are enrolled in for-profit schools, which already have a reputation for shortchanging students. > 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
• mschuster91 4mo ago
  The problem is... that won't help. Academia simply has gotten completely perverted from its original purpose: advancing science and training the next generation of scientists. 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".
• fzeroracer 4mo ago
  It's really quite sad to see people think this is a 'great' idea in a world where the US literacy rates are falling rapidly and people graduate out of highschool barely able to function. Slashing both the bottom and top end of education aid isn't going to suddenly make things financially viable or improve education; it's just going to further narrow education and turn college into Highschool 2 which it slowly is already becoming. 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.
• locopati 4mo ago
  Love to see everyone here cheering the destruction of the humanities in the name of cutting federal spending. Y'all do realize how that's going to play out, right? A less educated population who will be even more prone to fascism. 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.
• kelnos 4mo ago
  Typical attempt by the right to disrupt higher education. Hopefully this garbage gets challenged in and struck down by the courts.
• lizknope 4mo ago
  I don't think this is a good idea but I do think colleges should be required to list the average salaries that people with those degrees have. Include the career and salary progression over the next 30 years. 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.
  • tyleo 4mo ago
    IMO, this is a little different than smoking since they are something you buy and consume rather than something that’s bought for you.
  • Dumblydorr 4mo ago
    What about 17 year olds? Many kids have to decide before their 18th birthday. Even then, most kids turned 18 just months ago. Are they mature enough to sign?
    • xyzelement 4mo ago
      For most normal people the parents are / should be involved. In general if your average case is "I am figuring out reality from scratch" you are fucked. I can tell you that I was picking a choice of major as a recent immigrant and even my fresh off the boat grandma could have easily "poked holes" in my theory if I had chosen to study something stupid.
  • lesuorac 4mo ago
    > I do think colleges should be required to list the average salaries that people with those degrees have. Idk, I think just making student loans dischargable in bankruptcy is enough. Make both sides have skin in the game and you'll find students not able to get loans in situations that they would never get a salary to afford it.
• clcaev 4mo ago
  I would rather we align incentives of universities and make them a co-signer on the loan. 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-debt-bennett-hypothesis-tuition https://www.npr.org/2026/07/01/nx-s1-5876467/student-loans-d...
• grumple 4mo ago
  Here I am before my morning coffee after a night out. Forgive my orneriness, rambling, and errors. 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-education-issues-final-rule-hold-all-colleges-and-universities-accountable-low-earning-programs 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-accountability-final-rule-unofficial-copy-june-29-2026-114287.pdf 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 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.
• sajithdilshan 4mo ago
  I think the pure purpose of a university should be to mould students into critical thinkers and innovative mindset that would ultimately add value to the society so they can contribute back as tax payers to help the next generation. 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
  • jfengel 4mo ago
    It depends on who gets to define "meaningful". There are a lot of things that I think are meaningful that you probably don't. And while many would say that STEM automatically qualifies, I don't think that really holds up to scrutiny.
    • sajithdilshan 4mo ago
      I think it’s quite easy to decide. If the students at the end of the study can contribute to the society as tax payers to fund the next generation, then what they have studied is meaningful. It doesn’t have to be STEM necessarily.
      • pocksuppet 4mo ago
        Why is tax payment the only possible contribution to society?
        • sajithdilshan 4mo ago
          What other ways of contributions do you have in mind that can fund the education of the next generation?
          • pocksuppet 4mo ago
            For example, you could teach them things. But why is funding the education of the next generation the only possible contribution to society?
• dml2135 4mo ago
  This is getting somewhere but the criteria is too crude, and doesn’t take the cost of the school into account. 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.
• boringg 4mo ago
  The war on education continues. Tactically this serves the current political administration well. It is definitely a sad state of affairs in the US right now. 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.
  • somedude895 4mo ago
    > that the current admin thinks this is what secondary education is about Why should the taxpayer fund someone's liberal arts degree, or rather their professor's livelihood? You can think that they should, but that's a question not just "the current administration" is asking.
• confidantlake 4mo ago
  If the purpose of college is not to get a job, then why do they give out degrees? Why do they give out loans? 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.
• Dumblydorr 4mo ago
  We should normalize taking gap years and doing public service before undergrad. If a kids uncertain about their future, should we push them into school at 18, or push them into national parks maintenance, inner city volunteering, or any other public duty? The latter doesn’t make as much money for the banks and colleges, but may do more good. Plus the kids will have experience and wisdom and see the world before taking a mortgage out on their brain.
• mchusma 4mo ago
  This is great. Federally subsidized loans is directly (not solely) responsible for rapid inflation of college costs in the US. Anything to limit its use is a good thing. I’d argue that this test would be better expanded to actually having an ROI, not just do no harm, to encourage schools to not only provide value but also constrain costs (eg your school may make sense at $10k debt not $100k debt). This and/or making loans dischargeable in bankruptcy.
  • croes 4mo ago
    You know why many companies prefer employees without a degree? Easier to exploit and manipulate. This step makes it even easier for them
    • kingstnap 4mo ago
      Yes as we all know Employers are just bursting at the seems to hire people without a post secondary degree. Even more so if they don't even have a highschool degree. Just cant get enough of them lol.
      • croes 4mo ago
        No degree, doesn’t mean no skills. Or how do you explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship
    • matchbok3 4mo ago
      What data are you referencing that proves this? There is nothing inherent about degree X that makes someone less gullible. In fact, many college campuses are insulated echo chambers that do the exact opposite.
  • tzs 4mo ago
    > Federally subsidized loans is directly (not solely) responsible for rapid inflation of college costs in the US. Is it? Several years ago I looked for historical data on tuition rates. I wasn't able to find much only, but did find data for Stanford and some large public university whose name I don't recall. When I graphed their tuitions over 100 years starting from the early 1900s along with a graph of inflation over that same time the tuitions grew at roughly a fixed multiple of the inflation rate. That pattern and multiple were the same before and after the arrival of federally subsidized loans. Maybe if I had found data on a lot more schools something would have shown up.
• nullc 4mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enTEvon9pbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enTEvon9pbw
• nekusar 4mo ago
  The easier answer is to 'not treat academic loans the same way as a criminal courts monetary punishment'. In other words, quit treating them as non-dismissable in bankruptcy. 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.
• croes 4mo ago
  How does this work? 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
  • JKCalhoun 4mo ago
    What, this administration? (That was my first thought as well: it's to take "the elites" down a notch.)
    • croes 4mo ago
      How do you conduct this check and be certain that the issue lies with the education?
• m0llusk 4mo ago
  Seems like this will increase the importance of expelling low achievers. That in turn could sabotage the social and cultural role of higher education.
• djoldman 4mo ago
  The calculation is interesting: (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/ https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ Here is MIT: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166683-Massachusetts-Institute-of-Technology https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166683-Massachusetts...
  • analog31 4mo ago
    So the jobs of the past will determine the funding of the future. This must be some new kind of economic planning. Wait, no it's not. It's how economic planning always worked. It's summed up by the saying "The generals are always preparing to fight the last war." The university near my house is just putting the finishing touches on a building to house the new Data Science program, that was started a few years ago.
    • Bratmon 4mo ago
      If the future labor market is so unpredictable that we literally know nothing about it, then we really shouldn't be giving out student loans.
      • analog31 4mo ago
        We don't know literally nothing. For instance we know which college majors are favored politically, and which ones are popular. /s Or we can survey high school students. They are probably closer to the reality of the job market than the economic planners. Anecdote: My kids were in the regional youth orchestra, and every year at the last concert of the season, the program included a bio of every graduating senior, including their future plans. The hottest major was computer science, followed by biochemistry and engineering. These kids knew exactly which majors the economic planners would have chosen for them. But I agree. Student loans were a band-aid on a system that could have just as effectively subsidized college education directly.
• foxtrot8672 4mo ago
  Makes sense to me
• didgetmaster 4mo ago
  Call me a skeptic (which I probably am), but the bar seems incredibly low. I am glad they are finally doing something about worthless college degrees financed by the taxpayers; but this feels like too little. 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.
• chiefgeek 4mo ago
  I mean, just make students loans dischargeable during bankruptcy for chrissakes. Why doesn’t this get more attention? It’s ridiculous. Sometimes people make bad decisions. I did. And I went through bankruptcy, divorce and foreclose, CONCURRENTLY. it sucked and 17 years later I am a better person for it. Student loans are incredibly predatory in many cases and there is no way out. It is criminal.
  • segmondy 4mo ago
    then no loans for students. with a mortgage loan the bank can take the house, with an auto loan they can repo the car. so, can they repo your degree? i can understand the claim that credit card is predatory because they send you tons of junk mails but no one is sending you tons of junk mail asking you to get student loans, you practically have to go begging for it.
• amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
  This is gonna be rough for Christian colleges, and especially for divinity students. Or will they magic up an exemption for their favored religion?
• theahura 4mo ago
  Let's spend $100 billion + on Iran, but also cancel student funding because don't you know the budget is too high?
• prirun 4mo ago
  IMO colleges and other educational institutions should back the loans, not the government/taxpayers.
• fmajid 4mo ago
  While it makes sense for government to sponsor the humanities and arts, much as it does museums, many educational institutions, or more precisely specific departments, mislead students into applying for graduate programs with dim career prospects by exaggerating job opportunities. This is to further their turf in internecine battles, but saddles those students with crushing debt and little prospects of discharging it.
• erelong 4mo ago
  a regulation on top of regulations... perhaps deregulating education so there is more competition might produce better results over the poor quality of education offered today for higher costs
• NishanStepak 4mo ago
  Our economy is based on debt. New money comes from issuing debt. If there are not enough people taking on debt, the economy will not function as well. This is part of the reason so many people take on debt. The cultural value is worth more than the monetary value.
  • IAmBroom 4mo ago
    Only partially true. New money definitely comes from Nations issuing debt in the form of bonds, but I've never heard it claimed that my VISA interest adds to the GDP. > This is part of the reason so many people take on debt. The cultural value is worth more than the monetary value. That's hilarious. "Why did you spend four years getting a ___ degree?" "For the cultural value, and to add money to the economy!"
    • NishanStepak 4mo ago
      Visa Debt boosts consumer spending by adding to the Gross Domestic Product. People spend money they would not have had access to without credit cards or bank loans. The debt from loans flows to the business which the loan comes from. Also student loans suppress wages because of the need to pay off interest quickly. It is a double edged sword. Debt is a form of control.