As a holder of an English degree, this makes a lot of sense to me:
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.
The government sponsored student loan programs in the US have been subsidizing the insane increase in the cost of education and leading to massive debt for people who are ill-prepared to pay it off. Seems pretty obvious that we would only want to offer loan guarantees/subsidies to people who will likely be able to pay them off.
The Education Department intends to use IRS data to determine students’ salaries four years after they graduate and compare them to those of people similar in age who just have high school diplomas. If they’re below that baseline, that degree will be ineligible for loans.
I've seen counterarguments that the US still needs teachers, social workers, and musicians. I'd argue that if there is some case to be made (I don't think there is) for a governmental role in subsidizing those roles, it probably looks like grants, not loans. What's the point of subsidizing a loan to someone when it is pretty obvious they won't make enough money to pay it off?
I agree with your point about grants vs loans. If the job really serves some kind of public or strategic interest, why not just fund it directly? Especially since the traditional economic argument for supporting these jobs is that they produce public benefits that aren't easily captured as private compensation (vs. say, lawyers)
In general, I don't think there is a strong case for the government to be in the business of loan-making or loan-underwriting. But the system is already so built up around that idea, that it won't be easy to shake it.
Good!
Social work has no real method for proving its efficacy as a study path. Most jobs and careers in social work are either in non-profits, agencies or volunteering. A for-profit metric fails because, obviously, people don't get paid very well in those functions compared to "ideal" industries. People do that work to help others and their communities with self-sacrifice.
Makes economic sense to me
Those degrees will be cheaper without seignoriage bidding them up
And the subsidy can go to wages, on merit
More importantly, the colleges are money laundering / patronage networks. Latent DOGE W.