The U.S. Department of Education announced Friday it will be stripping federal student loan funding from any college program that does not yield a high salary after the student graduates.
Stereotypically worthless degrees in areas like “women’s and gender studies” have become the standing joke that jabs at how unserious college has become. But under new proposed rulemaking from the Education Department, if schools want to offer degrees that bury students in debt while giving them poor job prospects, the institutions will have to fund those programs themselves.
“The Trump Administration’s proposed accountability framework is grounded in common sense: if postsecondary education programs do not leave graduates better off, taxpayers should not subsidize them,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a press release. “This consensus-backed framework will drive meaningful change in postsecondary education, ending years of regulatory whiplash and addressing student debt that has left too many students worse off.”
Under the proposed rule, undergraduate programs will have to prove that degree recipients earn at least as much as a high school graduate before being eligible for student loan funding. Similarly, graduate school programs will need to prove higher earnings than an average bachelor’s degree. The average high school graduate is estimated to earn about $40,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“Programs that routinely fail to provide students with a reliable return on investment would lose access to federal student loans, and in certain cases, Pell Grants,” the department said.
Though the average high school graduate salary target is a fairly low bar, a Department of Education official told The Federalist that there are college programs that will get cut because the return on investment is so low. It also means that important degrees like liberal arts, philosophy, and history — areas where conservatives are severely lacking, leaving leftists in control of the American historical narrative — will likely be safeguarded.
According to a 2024 survey from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, 23 percent of bachelor’s programs and 43 percent of master’s programs have a negative return on investment. Student loan debt is now close to doubling the size of all U.S. university endowments combined. Student loan debt also outpaces Americans’ credit card debt and is roughly equal to automobile loan debt.
Meanwhile, the average net price for attending an undergraduate program — after grant and scholarship funding — rose by 93 percent from 1990 to 2020, when accounting for inflation. Department of Education data shows that the unlimited lending of taxpayer dollars has increased graduate tuition by 340 percent.
Schools can increase the sticker price of tuition knowing that no student is actually going to pay for it, but rather American taxpayers will foot the bill through Education Department student loans. One of the goals of the Trump administration is to stop that scam.
Right now, the Education Department’s student loan portfolio, funded by the American taxpayer, is nearly $1.7 trillion. It is estimated that fewer than 40 percent of borrowers are in repayment, and nearly 25 percent of borrowers are in default.
“More students are left financially worse off than if they had never attended college,” the department stated, adding that “now is the time for a hard reset in higher education.”
The new rule would apply across the board for all types of postsecondary education — from colleges and universities to career and technical schools. It is a major shift from the Biden and Obama administrations, which selectively targeted career and technical schools, as well as religious schools like Grand Canyon University, in order to destroy them while shielding their friends at universities from accountability.
Biden’s Education Department only threatened financial aid funding to places like technical schools through its “gainful employment” metric, while asking traditional four-year universities to share financial information with prospective students with zero threat to their funding.
The new rule “will better protect students and taxpayers by requiring institutions to sunset programs that do not deliver a strong financial return or to seek funding outside the federal financial aid system,” the department said.
The rule will be open for a public comment period for 30 days before becoming finalized, and is planned to take effect in July.
