Regardless of philosophical merits, the point of a loan is that it has to pay back and be paid back.
The New Republic reports from X, in a piece recirculated from July:
President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.
The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the Education Department has finalized a rule that will force schools to prove that the loans students are taking out are paying off.
Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music, and cosmetic certification programs will be hit the hardest. For-profit programs will also be hit particularly hard.
While the Trump administration is framing the policy as “accountability” for higher education, and some are welcoming the move, others see it as an attack on those whose work is important regardless of salary.
TNR neglects to admit that the federal loan environment needs a course correction: The United States has $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans, and one in five student loan borrowers (9.5 million) are in default. This means that a significant proportion of students are taking out loans to pay for degree programs that actually leave them worse off financially, at massive taxpayer expense.
According to the rule, when someone applies for a loan, the Department of Education will use IRS data to calculate the median earnings of students four years after graduating from the degree program at the specific school the loan would be used for. If the median earnings value is below the typical nationwide earnings of someone with just a high school education, $35,000, the degree will be ineligible for a loan.
Far from a blanket ban on loans for “all degrees that don’t make enough money,” the rule makes distinctions between schools and targets programs that are likely to leave students with $10,000 of debt and only the same earnings potential as someone with just a high school diploma.
“In medicine we have the Hippocratic Oath, which says that the first rule is to do no harm to the patient that you’re treating. You don’t want to make them any worse off, and we should have a similar mindset for education,” says Preston Cooper, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who helped to author the new rule with this principle in mind.
The bar to clear do-no-harm is extremely low, so most of the “socially valuable” but low-paying degrees in education, social work, and even the arts would still be available for loans. Only the worst of the worst programs across the country, about 5 percent, would be affected. Thirty-five percent of for-profit programs, infamous for scam-trapping students in low-value degrees, would bear the brunt of the new rule.
This is a good rule. The government is perfectly justified in taking steps to ensure that the degrees it pays for will produce economically self-sufficient citizens. But what of those who view this as an attack on work that is “important regardless of salary?”
“The government shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money,” says Gregory Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, in the article.
Any reform to a federal benefits program that reduces spending often gets called a punishment, but it’s particularly inappropriate here; the rule is designed to protect students from programs that will make them worse off. A student is free to explore a different program, or a different course of study, that passes the do-no-harm standard and still receive a loan, or they can matriculate right into the workforce.
But the argument continues that we should subsidize degrees in social work, art, and music even if the careers become unprofitable; their chance to pursue their passion in school, and their work post-graduation, are socially beneficial. This is why the government funds things like NASA, or public museums and parks, which market forces might not find to be valuable, revenue-generating enterprises but that provide cultural literacy and green spaces, or ennoble mankind through space exploration. We value these in kind and consent to the government’s use of tax dollars to steward such goods. (Yes, stewardship can fail. I still don’t want to raze the Smithsonian to the ground because it went woke under Biden.) Social workers, artists, and musicians are good things in themselves. Ergo, pay for their degrees.
But this isn’t a debate on the merits of art and music, which governments from local to federal do spend money to support. A healthy culture approves of these things. This is a debate on spending taxpayer money to support individual degree choices. In a world with infinite money, there are many, many “good” things that the government could fund at taxpayer expense, but in the world of limited resources, we’d spend ourselves into oblivion supporting every “socially good, financially unsustainable” enterprise. The role of the government is not to subsidize individual choices, especially ones that lead to a decrease in productive skills. It is unfair to ask an individual to pay for a degree that might be “good in itself” but will never personally benefit that taxpayer. Public works, national defense, NASA, all widely spread their benefit to taxpayers. Again, they can be dysfunctional, but the opportunity to benefit from them is open to every individual, versus the benefit of a college degree that is confined mostly to the recipient of the loan and not shared with the taxpayer.
Regardless of philosophical merits, the point of a loan is that it has to pay back and be paid back. College loans should help students make worthwhile investments that leave them better off, and the government is right to ensure that this happens.