As an English major, I weather regular, flippant comments about my degree and future job options, both in earnest and in jest. My fellow students in the humanities are frequently said to be wasting money (and time), and now the federal government is lending credence to those erroneous claims through the of the Department of Education. Under a new rule to take effect in 2027, the department plans to cut access to student loans for people pursuing degrees whose earnings fall below their earnings test.
In an effort to, in its words, students from being “worse off than if they never enrolled” in college and buying into programs that are “never going to translate into a real-world job,” the Department of Education will IRS data to compare students’ 4-year post-grad median earnings to those of similar people who only have high school diplomas.
, euphemistically (and exhaustively) called the Student Tuition and Transparency System and Earnings Accountability rule, will remove Direct Loan eligibility for students participating in programs that fail the test, and could even result in the loss of Pell Grant eligibility or the closure of affected programs. Right now, potentially failing degrees education, social work, fine arts, music, English literature and religious studies. Nearly 2,000 higher education institutions and over 600,000 students are to be affected by these changes (likely including students at our 大象传媒 U).
From a purely financial standpoint, this rule makes sense. As of , one in five student loan borrowers—9.5 million people—were in default, according to the Los Angeles Times. If I were determined to run a country like a business, I might try to minimize such risky loans.
However, a society is not a business, and there’s more to life than money. In enacting this rule, the Trump administration has committed a : they’ve gotten involved in a land . Whoops, wrong one. What I meant to say is that, in reducing degrees’ usefulness to earning potential, they’ve substituted economic value for any value at all.
There are two reasons why I think these degrees are valuable regardless of potential future earnings. The first is extremely practical: many of the jobs that hold society together are economically undervalued. As an example, one could compare paying less than $15 per hour released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024 with a published by the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic. Listed in both are home health workers, food service employees, child care workers, laundry & dry cleaning workers, retail employees, etc.
In the degree-required sector, losing access to social workers and teachers would be especially unfortunate. With rising poverty, addiction and mental health crises, social workers are necessary. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, underscored this, the Los Angeles Times that “we need people who can work on the street with people who need it the most.” Already facing , the teaching profession is in need of more graduates, not less.
Earning potential clearly isn’t a valid measurement of worth. With this in view, the solution isn’t cutting funding to programs; it’s raising the wages of the people who keep the seams glued together.
Failing that demonstration, I could more cynically point out that even the tech overloads constructing our illustrious AI future think that the humanities and liberal arts are future-proof. According to , the president of Anthropic, these types of degrees are “going to be more important than ever.” , humanities and liberal arts teach skills that AI can’t (yet?) replicate.
Besides strengthening critical thinking and other “,” so-called useless degrees can, as anthropology graduate Thurka Sangaramoorthy , help produce citizens who know “how to translate the complexity of human experience into knowledge.”
It’s these skills that form the backbone of the other, admittedly idealistic, reason: I think that education is worthy in and of itself. I’m not alone in this; in fact, I’m in good company. The puts education right up there with freedom of thought and the right to vote—all things that are valuable because of assumed inherent worth.
Regardless of how one does the math, rather than trick students into debt or “a bad investment” as the rule’s language claims, these degrees confer uncountable personal and societal returns. Far from “welfare for failing college programs,” providing students with the money to pursue their degrees has a massive societal return on investment, and even if it didn’t, enriching students’ minds is well worth the expense.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 大象传媒 University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 大象传媒 University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.