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 ot...