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

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5835631/turner-camhi-do-no-harm-college-loans

by nradov • 11 days ago

198 520 11 days ago

b3ing• 11 days ago

With all the layoffs I wonder how that will turn out

reenorap• 11 days 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.

delichon2• 11 days ago

TrumpU was never eligible for federal funds of any kind, including students loans, as it never sought accreditation.

pessimizer• 11 days 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• 11 days ago

Easy, make non college folks worse off.

EPWN3D• 11 days 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.

ashton3142• 11 days 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.

fwipsy5• 11 days 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.

senordevnyc3• 10 days ago

And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students

I suspect your comment is exactly what they’re talking about. I actually agree with your claim, but with limits! And yet the proponents of your position always seem to want a blank check.

How much exactly should the taxpayers pay to ensure that little Timmy goes to college and gets “an appreciation for what makes life worth living”, and why that amount? And how do we know if it’s working or not?

nec4b• 10 days ago

Today we have the highest percentage of people with an university degree compared to any other time in the history. Do you think democracy today is healthier than it was 30 years ago?

zmgsabst• 11 days ago

Engineers are part of the petite bourgeoisie so they need to speak appropriately to the monied class.

hankbond• 11 days 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.

throw2ih0203• 11 days 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• 11 days 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.

AngryData6• 11 days ago

Whats to stop people in their 20s now taking out tons of credit then declaring bankruptcy without the college?

chacha102• 11 days 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.

mulmen• 11 days ago

But the return on that subsidy is positive so why not do it?

linkregister4• 11 days ago

You could say the same about all government programs, including pensions and defense. Yet somehow popularly-elected governments keep finding themselves maximizing public utility. A curious property indeed.

DonsDiscountGas• 10 days ago

Also if they do subsidize it it should be in the form of public goods (libraries, publicly available research). There's some overlap there with loans to individuals but it's weak.

dataflow4• 11 days 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.

According to Reddit [1] it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.

I don't see why they couldn't have put a time limit on it though, if that was the reason. Say you can't declare bankruptcy for 7 years after you leave school.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StudentLoans/comments/ufejjg/why_ca...

nibbleyou• 11 days ago

I feel the interests would rise to accommodate for all the bankruptcies that inevitably happen exactly 7 years after

theahura7• 11 days ago

There is no evidence that students were actually doing this in any significant numbers.

premature optimization is the root of all evil. Seems like we shouldve actually shown that kids would do that before putting it into law

dlcarrier• 11 days ago

That answer is still begging the question of why it matters that bankruptcy rates stay low.

It's obvious that bankruptcy costs the lender, but how that cost gets absorbed is very important here. A mortgage or a car loan are secured debts, where the lender can repossess and sell the collateral, to pay off most or all of the losses if the borrow defaults on the loan. A student loan is an unsecured debt, so any defaults have to come out of the interest of the rest of the borrowers serviced by that loan program.

The more borrowers default on their payments, the higher the interest rate is needed to cover the write-downs. Without any protections against defaulting, interest rates would have to be near those of credit cards, while limiting when student loans can be discharged limits how much needs to be written down, which keeps interest rates lower.

Higher interest rates would not only make student loans cost more, it would also reduce their availability and increase the default rate, which could create positive feedback, causing the rates to increase significantly faster than inflation. Combine that with incentivization for college attendance already causing tuition itself to increase significantly faster than inflation, which itself makes student loans increasingly necessary, allowing student loans to be discharged during bankruptcy could have compounding effects on the fragile system that currently props up college attendance rates.

That still leaves the question of why the government should incentivize a significant portion of their constituency to be in college, (more than 1 out of every 13 US adults are currently enrolled) but I'll have have leave that question for politicians or maybe even voters.

CamouflagedKiwi2• 11 days ago

You can't really tell people that they just can't be bankrupt though. What are they supposed to do if they have debts they can't pay but they're not allowed to declare bankruptcy because they pinky swore they wouldn't do it seven years ago?

Aurornis9• 11 days ago

The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available.

If bankruptcy was allowed then the obvious play would be to take the loan, max out credit cards right before graduation, then declare bankruptcy before you get your first job.

Lenders would respond by increasing interest rates dramatically and restricting loans to those who had assets. This would basically turn into loans being for people with wealthy parents or having eye-watering interest rates.

euroderf• 11 days ago

it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.

Yes, this was a thing in (IIRC) the late 70s / early 80s, and the fed crackdown on the non-dischargeability of school loans in bankruptcy was enacted very quickly in response.

I myself got my bachelors in '79 and read about this idea and did not try it cos it was so incredibly unethical (and it sounded risky). In the words of the infamous Vince Lombardi, "Nice guys finish last."

imtringued4• 11 days ago

You would have to prove that you are unemployable to achieve any meaningful reduction in debt. For degrees that are demanded by the job market you wouldn't be able to declare bankruptcy and you would first have to make a reasonable attempt at paying off your loan.

Basically proving the point that the loan shouldn't have been given out in the first place.

dyauspitr3• 11 days ago

Because then the normal thing to do would be to graduate, declare bankruptcy when you have nothing to lose in life because you are just starting out, work for 7 years and you’re in the clear by your late 20s. Everyone would do it.

chihuahua2• 11 days ago

Maybe not everyone, but certainly lots of unethical people would do it, and there are lots of those. They'd post unbearably smug posts on LinkedIn about it too, calling everyone a sucker who didn't walk away from their $200k in student loans via bankrupcty.

The justification for student loans being exempt from bankruptcy is simply that there is no asset to be repossessed. Car loans, mortgages, and HELOCs are different. Credit cards have very high interest to pay for the higher risk. I guess we could have student loans with 29% interest, would that be preferable?

sethammons7• 11 days ago

Everyone would do it.

No, they wouldn't. Source: go back a couple decades, and student loans had low interest rates and were dischargeable in bankruptcy. It was an option. And, in fact, practically nobody did that.

phyzix57612• 11 days ago

Because its usually tax payer money that is used to fund these loans. If people started declaring bankruptcy tax payers would mandate that federal student loans stop existing as a matter of principle. People hold the value that its good to help students as long as they pay back at least what was given to them (adjusted for inflation).

conductr3• 11 days ago

We could also just decide to provide people higher level of education as a right. And, put some Medicare level pricing in place for colleges and universities to get cost in check.

I personally would want to see it with greater student participation/testing. The US education has been watered down to be so easy specifically because failing reduces LTV of a student. They want to just crank out degrees to as many people as they can. I personally think we need to figure out the healthy balance of education we need, because college for all isn’t it. Then just pay for them to learn at a high expectation level. Private schools will still exist to pump out full price degrees and that’s fine too.

dv_dt2• 11 days ago

Student university edication shouldn't even be a loan. The vast majority of student loans are financed by the government itself. The US spends trillions procuring defense (or war), it should also procure an educated workforce without saddling the citizenry with all the extra red tape and misery of collecting back a loan

nxm2• 10 days ago

Well someone has to do it as its bulk of NATO’s funding.

It also should not waste tax payer’s money of worthless degrees

quadrifoliate4• 11 days 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.

delichon2• 11 days ago

A baccalaureate is an academic degree, which is not what trade employers are looking for. They want certifications and licenses.

bluefirebrand• 11 days ago

They usually need their employees to have certifications and licenses, by law.

quadrifoliate4• 11 days ago

Licensing and degrees are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of engineers take licensing exams (CS degree holders are a large exception).

tbrownaw5• 11 days 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.

quadrifoliate4• 11 days 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?

dyauspitr3• 11 days 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.

userbinator2• 11 days ago

I think "trade school" is only a pejorative for those who are already fully immersed in the echo-chamber of academia.

mistercheph6• 11 days ago

Most of higher ed in the US are not education, they are trade schools for white collar work.

galkk• 11 days 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

dataflow4• 11 days 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.

quadrifoliate4• 11 days 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?

tbrownaw5• 11 days 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.

nashashmi• 11 days ago

It would definitely punish hosting degree programs that have poor career prospects and outcomes.

bruce5113• 11 days 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.

3eb7988a16633• 11 days ago

Also unclear how it works for the PhD pipeline. If you roll straight from bachelor's to a doctorate program - you have abysmal earnings for the next 5-6 years of your life.

riddlemethat• 11 days ago

Do those students deserve lifelong debt they cannot discharge?

dataflow4• 10 days ago

Another issue I don't see how to solve is: how do you even gather the data? That is: how do you even know if someone (a) is doing the same job as a graduate of your program would do, (b) actually skipped a program or its equivalent, and (c) is making more than a graduate of your program?

All of these are personal and private information. If I apply to a startup tomorrow and get hired without listing my engineering degree on my resume, then are they supposed to add me to some national database of uneducated engineers, list my compensation, and explain that they would've hired a graduate for the same role too? If I apply to another company and list my degree then is that gonna overwrite the database? How the heck would this actually work?

user3939382• 11 days 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.

ashton3142• 11 days 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…)

fwipsy5• 11 days 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.

RandomLensman7• 11 days ago

Could also reverse it: Why should tax payers cover things that pay off anyway.

mistercheph6• 11 days ago

Why should taxpayers pay for jobs training programs? since these vocational students expect to make lots of money with their certificate in hand, they can just take out a loan. this makes an actually rational system where the cost of job training is forced to be commensurate with the economic value of the output after the job program.

OTOH education should obviously be subsidized because it is a public good to have a society where everyone is educated, even though education will have close to zero measurable economic impact on any particular individual, every aspect of society benefits greatly from everyone having access to it.

It's crazy that education has been subverted into vocational training, and now that the transformation is nearly complete people are asking, wait why the hell is there any education going on in these places, aren't they supposed to be job training programs?

janalsncm5• 11 days ago

The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job.

This is the line universities give, knowing full well that the only reason students pay exorbitant tuitions is because bachelor’s degrees are necessary for most salaried jobs in the US. Schools want to have their cake and eat it too. If education isn’t about the money they should have no problem charging lower tuition rather than paying their presidents million dollar salaries.

The reason lecture halls are packed at 7:50am on a Monday is not because students are thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial function, but because Calc 1 is a prerequisite to their engineering degree, which is a prerequisite to their job.

WalterBright9• 11 days ago

If one thinks doing simple derivatives is a chore, I'd suggest a career other than engineering.

I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.

I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.

mistercheph6• 11 days ago

Those students should be separated from the students that want to learn, I know who I want to hire, or be sitting next to on the line and so does everyone else with a pulse: it's the person that is thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial.

Not the loser sitting in a class they hate, living out their big plan to set their life on fire doing a job that makes them sad because they love money.

BeetleB6• 11 days ago

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!

It's not a given that most arts/humanities programs are impacted. Just some arcane ones.

And while we're at it, they really should can the MFA programs. Most MFA programs exist just to milk money out of students.

senordevnyc3• 10 days ago

No offense to your wife, but why should the taxpayers fund her English degree so that she can then stay home with the kids? Sure, there might be some diffuse societal benefit, but if you can’t quantify it, how can we collectively decide if the benefit is worth the cost?

stevenalowe4• 11 days 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.

anon2914• 11 days ago

I agree with you on the goal of education. But whats the goal of government education subsidies?

theahura7• 11 days 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

stevenalowe4• 11 days ago

To help people get the education that they want. Not pick winners/losers.

BeetleB6• 11 days ago

I'm all for informed consent - publish the data - but leave the choice to the individual.

The choice is not being taken away - the Federal government is merely telling the universities to find some other way to fund those programs.

stevenalowe4• 9 days ago

the federal government is making value decisions for us. no bueno.

theahura7• 11 days 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 $$$

fc417fc8027• 11 days 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.

usrnm4• 11 days 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

pocksuppet8• 10 days ago

If it's economically advantageous shouldn't the private sector be able to fund it for a profit already?

userbinator2• 11 days ago

No, it's making it clear that government aid, i.e. taxpayer money, should not be paying for education that won't result in the population, and in turn the government, earning more.

liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn

s/learn/be indoctrinated/

knome• 10 days ago

s/learn/be indoctrinated/

Yeah, this comment demonstrates my own perspective on it quite well, in that it's likely just another bald political attack by the current administration on education, wherein a bureaucrat will get to decide what does and does not constitute a worthwhile degree, and is allowed to become the gatekeeper of what universities may teach by selective topic by topic defunding.

Will they decide to ignore the salaries of students "not working in their field"? That could be used as an instant bludgeon against anything centered on history, philosophy, or other educational paths that do not generally have high paying careers associated with them, even if those graduating from them do generally earn more on average than those with only a high school diploma.

Twenty years ago something like half of those in tech didn't have a college degree of any kind. Plenty of businesses are run by folks that don't have college degrees. Crafting statistics through careful manipulation of who is counted for making the comparisons could be used to exclude almost any set of courses that isn't STEM, law or medicine.

WalterBright9• 11 days ago

liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn

I didn't go to college to get an engineering degree. I am a born engineer and I wanted very much to learn the craft.

My diploma sits in the basement somewhere. I never put it on the wall.

BeetleB6• 11 days ago

This isn't banning such programs. The question is why the federal government needs to support them.

If you want to set up a teaching program to learn something arcane, by all means go for it and charge a fair/reasonable/whatever amount. Just because you're teaching it doesn't mean the Federal government should give you money. Let those who can afford it pay for it. If not many can, you need to make an argument why your program should be subsidized (and by who)? It shouldn't be a default that the support will come from the Federal government.

From the article:

Specifically, certificate programs in cosmetology and somatic body work have the highest predicted failure rates.

Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these?

For more common arts/music programs, the Federal government can fund arts/music initiatives (not tied to education).

mistercheph6• 11 days ago

Education is not something arcane, TBH it's really the vocational schools that should be forced to call themselves something different. 99% of university students are not there for an education, they are in welding school upper-middle-class edition. Vocational programs are essential infrastructure, but they are not education, and those programs should not receive funds allocated for education or be held to the same standards as education programs and vice versa.

E.g. most computer science departments where computer science is not taught, students just participate in a charade of memorizing arbitrary facts that they never even attempt to understand in order to get a certificate that entitles them to receive on-the-job training to glue javascript components together for 6 figures.

Job training != education

theahura7• 10 days ago

Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these?

No, but I don't think means testing is a better alternative. You and I both know that this is a wedge to punish perceived political enemies, as much as you know that the total number of people who graduate with a degree in "somatic body work" is such a small fraction of people as to be negligible

Nationally, about 10,600 to 10,700 students graduate annually with a degree or certificate in the broader category of Somatic Bodywork & Therapeutic Services. The vast majority (over 10,500) specialize in Massage Therapy, while purely focused Somatic Bodywork programs see much smaller cohorts, averaging roughly 40 to 50 graduates per year across all US institutions. (From Gemini)

This is kinda like saying we should get rid of encryption because a few people may use it for bad things, or that we should require identification before anyone can get on the Internet because some people may be hurt by it

atomicthumbs3• 10 days ago

so poor people don't get to do to school?

CircuitSeuss2• 11 days 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• 11 days 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?

WalterBright9• 11 days ago

The more it's subsidized, the more it costs. I don't think there's any surprise there.

CircuitSeuss2• 11 days 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?

janalsncm5• 11 days ago

From the article this mainly affects for profit colleges.

Also, if history and philosophy are so important maybe we can come up with a more affordable way to teach them to people those things than university.

delis-thumbs-7e• 11 days ago

if history and philosophy are so important

Jesus Mary and Joseph we are cooked.

collinmcnulty2• 11 days ago

Aggravating the issue is the administration’s goal. They want an undereducated population and are using the more popular issue of student debt as a fig leaf. Note especially how it’s on the university to prove that each program justifies itself economically, increasing the administrative burden on colleges. If they really cared about limiting taxpayer burden, they’d exempt in-state tuition at state schools from this rule.

nullc4• 10 days ago

Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system.

A significant reason it is insanely expensive is because we keep shoveling public money into it.

Higher ed is a cash incinerating inferno. When there is an out of control fire you must stop throwing fuel into it.

tencentshill• 10 days ago

Well, these Heritage Foundation guys in charge are all about the big picture. Less educated populace? Make it happen, I don't care how.

janalsncm5• 11 days 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.

frognumber2• 11 days 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.

collinmcnulty2• 11 days ago

You don’t think investing in arts, humanities, and music contributes to a functioning democracy?

eastbound• 11 days 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.

TheAceOfHearts• 11 days ago

A lot of people severely underestimate the value and impact of the arts because they don't produce immediately visible results. But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times.

phantomathkg• 11 days ago

Here we have an example of someone who see college/university as a vocational training center for worker, instead of seeing it as higher education that inspire civilized thinker.

tadfisher• 11 days ago

If I want a philosophy degree then it's my God-given right to pay $240,000 plus interest for it. Maybe it shouldn't be subsidized, though.

andai• 11 days ago

Well, the way things are going, maybe it should be way more subsidized...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818544

https://archive.ph/94e7p

chihuahua2• 11 days ago

Right. And also, when you have paid $240k for that degree, don't write endless screeds complaining that the degree was a "scam" and that it's someone else's fault that you're not earning much with that degree.

Even in the 00s and 10s, there used to be people complaining bitterly that they have a lot of student loans after getting a degree in puppetry (seriously.) And the same people would have lit themselves on fire in a public square if they had been denied student loans for getting a puppetry degree.

I feel that you can't have it both ways: guaranteed student loans for any degree, no matter how impractical, and also complaining that some degrees funded with student loans don't lead to a lucrative career. Choose one or the other.

IsTom• 11 days ago

Is this like, a real sum of money americans pay for a degree? Overhead must be mind-boggiling if like just two students are needed to pay educator's salary for the period.

imtringued4• 11 days ago

Yeah it is absolutely despicable to tell students that they shouldn't make a profit off their education, while the colleges are allowed to inflate tuition fees and profit as much off the student's education as possible.

If you look at the music teacher example you see the end result of these perverse incentives turning into a pyramid scheme. Being a music teacher at the college is one of the few profitable ways to pay off your student debt while staying in your preferred career so of course she doesn't want to give that up, she's still in debt.

If college isn't about money, that turns college into a consumer good, but if college is a consumer good, why should the government let people borrow money for their consumption?

By that logic the government should lend money to young people so they can go on expensive vacations and enjoy their youth.

bradleybuda• 11 days ago

Is United Airlines “just about making more money”? Yes. Has it done so by offering people a valuable product and generating massive consumer surplus? Also yes.

Vaslo2• 11 days ago

If it’s your own money, college can be whatever you want. When it’s someone else’s, they get to be involved in making a decision as to what college is for.

kelnos2• 11 days ago

Collectively, yes, but not individually.

The problem is that the electorate tends to not understand the concept of second-order effects. For example, a college graduate in the arts might, directly or indirectly, generate more economic activity than someone without a college degree, regardless of the difference in income level of people in those two buckets.

lesuorac2• 10 days ago

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

The problem is going to that there's going to be a large shock to the system. As pointed out in the article, a lot of teachers make $55k. So basically no education degree should be awarded because the average worker is better than a teacher.

Eventually the supply of teachers will dry up so much that salaries will go up. But how many years do you think until that happens? And then add 4 to when the supply catches up. Although I would bet what happens is that states no longer require a degree.

m3047• 10 days ago

Schools can develop training and scholarship programs. Maybe we'll find out a degree in Egyptology isn't necessary to teach basic reading and writing? Although walking like an Egyptian sure is fun. /s

Many educators are unionized. These days (it comes and goes, I wish it had been waxing when I was that age) the electricians' and HVAC techs' unions offer apprenticeships to pretty much all comers, not just the niece or nephew of a member.

whatever1• 11 days 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• 11 days 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• 11 days 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• 11 days 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• 11 days 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.)

jltsiren2• 11 days 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• 11 days 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.

arjie2• 11 days 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• 11 days 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...

roughly• 11 days ago

Thank god the economy rewards everything we consider valuable with appropriate monetary compensation.

greyb• 11 days 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-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.

dml21355• 10 days ago

As a fellow arts graduate, I strongly agree. I’ve seen many friends and colleagues fall into catastrophic student loan debt as they tried to find some direction in life, helpfully exploited by universities along the way. It’s borderline predatory.

RandomLensman7• 11 days 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?

mishellaneous4• 9 days 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• 11 days 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• 11 days 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.

dml21355• 10 days 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.

tancop• 11 days 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.

ryzvonusef11• 11 days 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• 11 days 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.

reactordev2• 11 days 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.

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

We live in a society and to some extent we decide what that means

Precisely my point! Tax-payers/Voters (effectively the same thing) get to decide how much indulgence they want to give.

In Australia you are happy to extend the base, but in the US it seems they are reducing the base, and thus they are limiting options.

Some countries limit the indulgence not by limiting access to loans/aid, but by limiting available seats in university instead.

Ultimately it's up to the paying party how much risk they want to tolerate.

Vaslo2• 11 days ago

Very sensible take. If you want to study Latin American gender roles and it’s your own money, and a college can break even on its cost to teach you that, you should be able to. When it’s someone else’s money, the outcome changes.

watwut• 10 days ago

There are not that many of those students. But oh boy, conservatives hate that kind of research regardless of how students do in the market.

It is ideologically inconvenient, because the whole premiss is that gender roles depend.

RandomLensman7• 11 days ago

If it is quite profitable to get a certain education, why would it need the tax payer to provide the loan for it? Shouldn't that be easy to fund from the private sector?

threetonesun2• 10 days ago

Assuming you’re not talking about a loan to do this (at which point you’ve reinvented indentured servitude), back when there was a smaller pool of college graduates it was easier to find a company that would pay for your education, some even offering bonuses if you completed it.

HPsquared2• 10 days ago

Student loans aren't your standard private sector loan though. They are a special legal category, which is why they can't be discharged in bankruptcy. All the usual borrowing standards don't apply either. No commercial lender would give that size of loan to an 18 year old with no collateral. The collateral is effectively a claim on the person's future earnings. What a crazy contract to have young people routinely pressured into.

tyleo5• 10 days ago

I think the point is that it’s so beneficial to society for people to get these degrees that we should lower the barrier even further. I think you are right that having the private sector fund it is a good base state, I suspect you’d find that you can improve on that base by funding it with some public money. We’ve probably gone a little too far in that direction though.

arenaninja2• 10 days ago

I'm not convinced it's necessary but it sure as hell is nice. I got through undergrad with subsidized loans and it was nice to not worry about interest while I wasn't working yet.

The private sector does fund some loans but I think the current program just needs re-working. Forgiving all these loans is a no-go so this measure is a step in the right direction. I'd like them to lock down the interest rate to 2% + inflation next. The government does need to incentivize a certain degree of higher education for innovation.

delusional5• 10 days ago

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.

Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated while their brains are still maximally plastic, and society get maximal value out of the education? Is there no value in handing over our knowledge to the new generation BEFORE they act without it? Is there no value in knowing something the "free labor market" has not priced in?

Rights are something we grant each other. If we see a value in an educated public, we can grant each other the right to get an education. There are no "rights" in nature, so the statement "you don't have the right" is meaningless in matters of politics, where the whole point of the discussion is to figure out if you should "have the right".

Your inner world must be a dead hellscape if you believe that the only things that exist are "prestige", arbitrary "knowledge", or a job.

Eddy_Viscosity22• 10 days ago

Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated

This is what the public school system is for. Post-secondary education was not meant to be for everyone. But the world has changed and universities and colleges only service as the gate-keepers to degrees and diplomas that every employer now has required to get a job (regardless of whether that education is needed for the actual job). It's not that young people passionate about learning as much as they can in a given field don't exist, its that university is not about them anymore.

ericd6• 10 days ago

Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated while their brains are still maximally plastic, and society get maximal value out of the education?

Eh, I’ve often thought that going to college would’ve been much better after a few years of building software in the workforce. I didn’t understand the “why” of going into a lot of the subjects I studied, they didn’t have much real experience to attach to in my brain, and retention was worse.

I think Waterloo’s mix of school and working is a pretty solid way to tackle this.

ndriscoll13• 10 days ago

Assuming you were educated, your assertion that natural rights are meaningless is a good argument to me that the project of universal tertiary education is simply not worth it. If we can't even get people to see that there's a difference in kind between e.g. your right to reciprocal force in the event someone attempts to take your life vs. your "right" to have people work for you to do nothing but attend classes (when all of the information is already free online, so really it's just social hour for years on end plus a credential), then the value of the "education" we're providing seems dubious to me.

sscaryterry2• 10 days ago

purpose of a college LOAN is 100% a job

Wow, what horseshit.

burpingtree• 10 days ago

Yes, this is slightly incorrect. The purpose of a college loan is 100% that the default rate will be low enough that the interest payments will provide a positive return for the lender. The expected default rate is given by the lendee’s expected future income. The majority of the expected income is driven by the expected job of that lender, but some of that expected income could come from other income sources such as investments especially in fields such as finance.

lionkor4• 10 days ago

This is such a shitty American take (or any of the countries that somehow decide the USA is a good model to follow), it's kind of baffling that this is a popular opinion and explains a lot of the social issues (or near lack of social system) you guys have.

You know that technically, people are allowed to have fun and not strive to be a billionaire, right? Its everyones right to pick a path they want, and enjoy, and if they end up providing a service with it, or just contributing to art or science, thats good for humanity and for society.

In fact, this works, if you look at capitalist countries with social support systems, free universities (or very cheap), and so on.

unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree

Obviously everyone should make some money for themselves and pay taxes, but you're acting like the system falls apart if a couple ten thousand art students decide to live a bit more frugally and instead add to the local culture.

It's embarrassing that we are all part of the same species. Life can be so fantastic when your society accepts that you can just go study whatever you want, and then take a job in that field (or not). Individual success doesn't need to be measured ONLY by your contribution to the tax pool.

If you tax the rich and a couple large companies, spend a little less on harassing poor countries, your entire society can lean back and live a significantly better life. Instead you focus on reducing culture, removing any fun that isn't AI driven corporate data gathering slop, denying poor people health care, denying poor people an education, and leaning back and saying "well, they should try harder to contribute to society".

tyleo5• 10 days ago

I think folks would agree with you in valuing arts and humanities, just that they shouldn’t do it on someone else’s dime. I suspect you’d find that a widely held belief and not just an American one.

It’s hard out there and I have some non-college educated family who also struggled in life wondering why we should pour money into degrees people can’t pay off when they received no help themselves.

frogperson• 10 days ago

Very well said. i wish I could give you 1000 upvotes, or better yet a real vote.

arenaninja2• 10 days ago

Why not gather up with other like-minded individuals and fund scholarships and grants if you feel strongly about this? I disagree that taxing the rich is our way out of this. There's a reason the starving artist is a cultural trope.

Not only that but the higher ed industry has abused the hell out of this program. I'm close to people who were studying degrees they will never come close to paying and now they're $100k+ in the hole. The reality is that degree shouldn't have been available to them.

bluGill4• 10 days ago

You are allowed to have fun. Do what you want I don't care. I don't even know you.

However if you want me the taxpayer to pay for the fun it needs to be a good investment for me. Otherwise I want to use my money to have fun myself.

mlrtime2• 10 days ago

Message aside, I'm surprised your post is tolerated here. If this same tone was used against the HN group think it would be [deleted]. Be a little more respectful if you want to win minds.

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

I'm not an american, my profile clearly states I'm from the 3rd world.

My father grew up dirt poor, and a basic associate degree (gotten via his saving from a factory job plus a partial scholarship he won) changed his entire trajectory from being a random labourer to an white collar office worker with enough funds to educate his own kids, especially his daughters.

My father and my siblings helped fund my education, a privilege I'm very cognizant of, and I'm very jealous of countries with free education.

But as someone living in a country with a very poor economy and an even poorer tax base, I also have very realistic expectations in terms of what tax money purchases and what reasonable expectations one should have.

I desperately want an expansion in the education base of my country, but also realise the current tax payer base has limit on how much they can pay to purchase this expansion.

And this fact also extrapolates to rich countries, they may have more money but at the end of the day the math is the same, there is a limit to how much they wish to indulge.

In fact I'm currently applying for a chance to win a PhD abroad, which would clearly be funded by foreigner tax payers. I would be at the whims of their largesse to get paid to study, and if I don't win, it's clearly because they do not wish to expand this indulgence to me, a bitter fact I must accept with grace and move on.

I may cry and moan about it, but one has to be realistic about these things.

sib• 10 days ago

> The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job > If knowledge and prestige is all that matters

I disagree. The primary purpose of the college degree is the job. If you don't need a job (which derives from the signaling factor of the degree == the prestige), you can just study the same material and gain the knowledge by yourself without getting a degree.

bitmasher92• 10 days ago

Self study can only go so far, and often when someone self studies there are obvious gaps in their education compared to someone that entered a formal program.

Studying in a university has the advantage of learning from experts and being surrounded by people that are also learning from experts. This has significant advantages.

ronjakoi• 10 days ago

I think it's best for universities to train their own future researchers. Research, science, and the university's own core goals should be the focus of teaching.

Anything that spills over from that can be jobs, industry, innovations and all that.

Hizonner• 10 days ago

Few people can do actually do that effectively.

WillAdams9• 10 days ago

I would argue that a child has a right to a certain number of years of education.

The best school which I attended divided classes between academic and social --- the latter were attended with one's age peers (so homeroom, social studies, PE, &c.) while the former were attended at one's ability level (with a cap of four years through 4th grade, so I was in 4th grade but taking 8th grade science, English, and history classes) and for older students, some teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, so it was possible to take college courses while still in high school --- it was even possible to earn a college degree (or even multiple degrees) at high school graduation.

There was also a trade school track for students so inclined.

ericd6• 10 days ago

Sounds great, if you don’t mind sharing, what school was it? We have a couple of young kids that that seems like maybe a good fit for.

bitmasher92• 10 days ago

I would argue that a child has a right to a certain number of years of education.

I would also argue society is better if its people are more educated.

class3shock• 10 days ago

"The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job"

Check the marketing literature for any college and you will find that is not true.

The only people doing degrees for knowledge and prestige are the filthy rich and while they may make up a significant percentage of students at the top 5 schools, they make up a tiny percentage of all college students.

The last point is where I end up aswell though and I think no matter how you look at it colleges are doing a disservice to young people and taxpayers pushing worthless degrees backed by government loans that they (the colleges) don't have to worry about repaying.

armchairhacker• 10 days ago

I'd say the purpose is usually to get a "career" i.e. good job, possibly as a paid researcher and/or professor.

aleph_minus_one6• 10 days ago

The only people doing degrees for knowledge and prestige are the filthy rich and while they may make up a significant percentage of students at the top 5 schools, they make up a tiny percentage of all college students.

I already wrote it quite some times on HN: at least in Germany, where university is rather cheap, the situation is typically different:

- The really rich kids will typically have a "career on rails", for example because of family connections. They thus often consider getting the university degree as an annoying obstacle on their way towards a certain career.

- If you, on the other hand, don't come from a wealthy background, you better are very idealistic with respect to your chosen degree course (with the only typical constraint that it will not be not be some "useless degree" (including what is called in German "Orchideenfächer" (i.e. small, obscure degree courses for which there is often no real job market))). If you are not in deep love with the subject that you study, family and friends will likely "suggest" that you should drop out of university and get a form of tertiary education that is a better fit for you, such as Fachhochschule, Berufsakademie (both offer a much more applied tertiary education than universities do) or Ausbildung (vocational training).

TLDR: In Germany, typically not the rich kids get a university degree for their seek of knowledge (the rich kid rather often consider attending university as an annoying obstacle on their certain career), but rather the smart, idealistic kids from a less well-off family background.

Aurornis9• 10 days ago

Check the marketing literature for any college and you will find that is not true.

I actually had the opposite takeaway. The last university literature booklets I saw were all about the experience, the facilities, the sports, the events, and the fun. I don’t even remember if they included content about getting a job at the end.

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

Perhaps I should have written it a bit more clearer, but in my mind I was comparing degrees with certifications. I feel studies/degrees that have an associated certification (possibly legally mandated) linked to it should have a different loan profile as compared to open-ended degrees.

Whether you are going to Trade school to become a Plumber, or Med school to become a Doctor; in both cases there is the study part (that may or may not issue a degree also) and then there is the certification part, and that certification part is what's important for the job and thus directly linked to it. You studied medicine but your certification is specifically for Cardiology, so THAT's you career path. Please stop looking at kidneys, you are disturbing the Nephrologist.

But ordinary college degrees NOT linked to certification, just have the study part... and there is NO direct linkage with a job.

An English degree can be done just for the sake of it, or to become a Teacher, or to become a Journalist or Author or whatever.

The degree itself isn't linking itself to one single career or closely related group of careers; they may waggle their eyes and pose innuendoes, but unless there is a specific certification, they are open ended, and that's deliberate by choice.

They WANT it to be open-ended because then the responsibility isn't on them. Oh you did Chemistry? Look at ALL the career options you have! We are just here to broaden your mind with the wonderful world of chemicals!

You might have the potential to become a chemist or pharmacists or a lab tech or who knows even a famous researcher; look at this example of XYZ who become world renowned in lithography machine lubrication who studied chemistry at this very institution! Or look at ABC, they now work at NASA, wouldn't YOU like to be an astronaut-chemist doing stuff on the ISS? Go forth, the world is your oyster!

The possibilities are limitless, and therefore the degree is NOT about the job, it's just about the education. Whether you end up as a chemistry teacher or a drug dealer in like Walter White is up to you.

And thus it's your duty to research, what job options do you feel are possible for you after the degree? and is a loan worth it for you?

Compare that with career-specific certifications, and there you have exact data of how many jobs are in demand and more importantly you KNOW you will be locked to a certain path and thus you (and the loan giver) can plan accordingly.

Sorry if this reply was a bit of a ramble, but I hope I was able to clarify what I meant.

rdsubhas• 10 days ago

I think everyone would have been up in arms had the OP said the opposite.

beej712• 10 days ago

One thing to add to your argument is the cost of the degree, which is now 5x more (inflation adjusted) than when I went to school. None of these programs would be at risk under these new rules back in the day.

braiamp• 10 days ago

The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job

Superior education is the ladder towards self-sufficiency because that's what the labor market does, it requires you to hold a degree. Now, you may be right that the degree by itself doesn't guarantee it but you are ignoring that the students don't have any choice to do so. So your solution actually punishes the students rather than fix the labor market inflated requirement values. Fix the labor market and suddenly education doesn't have to be financed to allow youngsters be able to look after themselves.

N_Lens• 10 days ago

Unless you specialize in Egyptology, which then leads to getting tenured somewhere so you teach Egyptology to others. A pyramid scheme, if you will.

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

I actually wrote Egyptology in my comment but then deleted it and wrote XYZ instead ;p

Arubis2• 10 days ago

I want my taxes to go towards a more educated populace, full stop.

roenxi• 10 days ago

Then they don't need to tax you and you can just give the money to educational institutions. The argument for taxes is either "I don't think it is fair for me to pay for this alone since others are benefiting" or "this absolutely positively must be a group effort" (eg, the military).

"I want my taxes to..." is a generally a bad start, because the point of taxes is it doesn't matter what an individual taxpayers wants to happen to them. Most taxpayers want the taxes to not be spent the way they will be. That is why they are taxes. If people had an actual choice then in all likelihood they wouldn't pay them.

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

I do too, but you need buy-in from your fellow tax-payers/voters if they are willing to fund it also.

I live in a 3rd world country, and due to the limitation of our weak taxpayer base, we can afford to fund only limited number of seats, which are won by certain competitive exams, and anything beyond that is considered 'self-finance' (i.e. figure it out on your own). Your country will have to decide its own limits.

xyzelement2• 10 days ago

// The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job

I think we are past the age where the folks who went to higher education were scholars in pursuit of some higher truth and a broad elevation of themselves. The percentage of people who care about that is very low.

As college became "a universal must." Nearly 40 percent of US adults have a bachelor's degree or higher, and obviously 40% of any population aren't inherently scholars.

So yes college today is primarily either "something people just do" (I believe this is the attitude that leads to proliferation of obvious worthless degrees) or at best "a way to get a better job."

An obvious internet-era reality is that a true scholar can find access to knowledge and like-minded peers outside the universe much more easily.

ozim2• 10 days ago

Really not fun part is that loads of office jobs can be done with high school education level where companies require a degree.

I guess it is because there are not enough office jobs and not enough masters/bachelors level jobs so we are all at rat race.

metaphor• 10 days ago

You have the right to a degree in XYZ...

No, you don't.

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

As in, you and the college can decide privately if they want to teach you XYZ in return for money from you. Getting tax payers to chip in brings in a 3rd party and then they have right to decide whether you get to learn or not.

insane_dreamer• 10 days ago

That may have been true in the past. But in today’s world the purpose of a college degree is 100% a job — it’s the entry level requirement to be considered for almost any position. It’s basically the new high school degree. So we should treat it the same way we treat high school which is taxpayer funded to ensure as many people as possible get one

newsoftheday3• 10 days ago

So we should treat it the same way we treat high school which is taxpayer funded to ensure as many people as possible get one

There are no college graduates I've interviewed in the last two decades, whose quality of output suggests to me college is something the tax payer should be on the hook for.

aleph_minus_one6• 10 days ago

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.

I think there is a middle ground: If knowledge (and prestige) is what matters, you avoid taking a loan. But even if you take no or a very small loan, it does not mean that you can afford to go the scenic route and get the degree slowly.

newsoftheday3• 10 days ago

The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job

I agree, I think the purpose of college is supposed to teach students how to learn and the importance of commitment to lifelong self-learning. The output quality of graduates the past two or three decades suggests to me that doesn't seem to actually happen very much.

whateverboat• 10 days ago

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.

you said a lot of things with a lot of assumptions in that sentence

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

If it becomes unreasonable/unfeasible to have a degree without a taxpayer backed grant/aid/loan, then right to a degree implies right to that aid.

unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree.

You are assuming that the only way a person pays back that money is by tax payer account. They could also be paying back that money by being a nurse improving people's healthy making population more productive.

At the end of the day, you are looking at this all wrong by being very ideological about it. You need to look at it from what's best for the country in long term.

grayhatter• 10 days ago

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.

This is a nice idea, are you younger, or older? I find younger people say you have all the time in the world, where older people more often advocate for not wasting time, and to do it now. I know neither are arguments from your comment, but the context around the difference you see is interesting.

Other than compounding interest, why? Shouldn't everyone do what they find fulfilling as early as possible? Wouldn't acquiring knowledge earlier be as good as acquiring money earlier?

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.

I find arguments like this incredibly stupid and shallow. The whole point of a society is to improve reality. The ability to do things together that you can't do alone. No one is owed a society, but we're all forced to live within one with dubious consent, (excluding people who've opted out completely from society). Just by the expectation that you'll obey the social contract, you're are owed the benefits of said society.

I *HATE* dealing with stupid people. I'm fine with my tax dollars being used to provide free education, at every level. To quote Stewart:

How about this, you reimburse me for the [pointless war for oil] and [college education] is on me!

I've gladly payed taxes; and I'll eagerly assert that everyone does have the right to taxpayer funded education. It's what I want my money to go towards.

dragonwriter• 10 days 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.

No, the purpose of a college loan is to enable a student to pay for college with future earnings. It can be perfectly rational even if the loan/degree doesn't improve job prospects (and even more especially so if it doesn’t “improve” them in a purely financial sense that ignores the borrower’s actual utility function.)

The purpose of this test (like the special accounting rules imposed on the postal service) is not to better fulfill the purpose of a college degree or the purpose of a college loan. The purpose of the test is to increase the administrative compliance cost of participating in the college loan program as a means of stifling the program. Like the special accounting rules imposed on the Postal Service, its how you use the political power you have to chip away at a public program that you feel is too popular to abolish directly.

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.

You have an inherent right to neither, but while any public policy must observe rights, it need not be limited to them.

someguydave• 10 days ago

But also the taxpayers and dollar holders have a right to ask for good management of their taxes and savings

scoofy2• 10 days ago

This is a fine thesis, but under this thesis student loans should be discharged under bankruptcy just like any other liability.

The previous poster is arguing that the underlying rules that block student loans being discharged under bankruptcy, generally speaking, mean that the loan is about a job, and not just about borrowing for education.

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

No, the purpose of a college loan is to enable a student to pay for college with future earnings.

Aren't you and I saying essentially the same thing? If you are taking a loan, there better be a job that helps pay for it.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 10 days ago

"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."

Are you a US taxpayer. Profile says you are located in Pakistan

ryzvonusef11• 10 days ago

I'm Pakistani, and I'm just stating the facts as I see them.

Many countries have free college education, but at the end of the day some one has to pay for it, and those are the tax-payers.

And frankly, if your country's tax payers are, for whatever reason, NOT willing to subsidise it (in whatever way or form)... what can you do?

It's not like I like this situation, but those are the facts. The wave of anti-social trend going in the west is because of this belief; tax payers in those countries no longer feel program XYZ is worth it... so it goes.

noelwelsh• 11 days ago

This blog post is very relevant to the discussion: 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• 11 days 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• 11 days 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• 11 days 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• 11 days 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.

kelnos2• 11 days ago

Typical attempt by the right to disrupt higher education. Hopefully this garbage gets challenged in and struck down by the courts.

lizknope• 11 days 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.

tyleo5• 10 days 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.

Dumblydorr2• 10 days 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?

xyzelement2• 10 days 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.

lesuorac2• 10 days 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.

clcaev2• 10 days 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-d...

grumple2• 10 days 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...

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.

sajithdilshan4• 10 days 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• 10 days 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.

sajithdilshan4• 10 days 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.

dml21355• 10 days 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• 10 days 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• 10 days 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.

confidantlake2• 10 days 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.

Dumblydorr2• 10 days 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• 10 days 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.

croes4• 10 days 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• 10 days 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.

matchbok3• 10 days 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• 10 days 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.

nullc4• 10 days ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enTEvon9pbw

nekusar2• 10 days 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.

croes4• 10 days 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• 10 days ago

What, this administration?

(That was my first thought as well: it's to take "the elites" down a notch.)

croes4• 10 days ago

How do you conduct this check and be certain that the issue lies with the education?

m0llusk• 10 days 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.

djoldman2• 10 days 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/

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

analog312• 10 days 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.

Bratmon2• 10 days 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.

rainsford3• 10 days ago

Unless I'm misunderstanding, that calculation sounds fundamentally wrong if it's comparing median college graduate earnings after 4 years against high school graduate earnings in general.

After 4 years the median college graduate is still early in their career and likely hasn't hit their maximum income potential, but they're being compared against high school graduates at every stage of their careers, including those who have maxed out their potential income in whatever field they're working in. Or is the high school comparison similarly limited to early career?

picofarad• 10 days ago

A bachelors degree should be a large jump in earnings. I think in the 90s it was stated that high school diploma was lifetime ~$600,000, bachelors was $1,200,000,and so on up to PhD at $6,000,000 lifetime median earnings.

So a bachelors degree should get something like 25-50% more money after graduatation than the median high school graduate.

djoldman2• 10 days ago

It's 25-34 year olds:

To calculate the earnings premium for undergraduate programs, the threshold is the median U.S. Census Bureau earnings of a working high school graduate, aged 25-34 who were not enrolled in postsecondary education during the year of the associated measured earnings, in the state in which the institution is located unless the institution enrolls more than 50% of its students from out of state, in which case the national median is used.

Details here: https://www.nasfaa.org/ge_2026

foxtrot8672• 10 days ago

Makes sense to me

didgetmaster• 10 days 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• 10 days 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• 10 days 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.

amanaplanacanal2• 10 days 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?

theahura7• 10 days ago

Let's spend $100 billion + on Iran, but also cancel student funding because don't you know the budget is too high?

prirun• 10 days ago

IMO colleges and other educational institutions should back the loans, not the government/taxpayers.

fmajid• 10 days 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• 10 days 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

NishanStepak2• 9 days 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• 9 days 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!"

NishanStepak2• 8 days 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.

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

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