The Trump administration keeps finding fresh ways to make this country worse while calling it making America great again. President Donald Trump has already done his best to make the nation unaffordable, to normalize white nationalist bigotry, and to make policy out of scientific illiteracy, and it should never be forgotten that he, his administration, and his GOP enablers are also working hard to give the U.S. a populace that is less educated and far less prone to critical thinking.
And that’s why he’s moving to make it so students can’t take out federal loans if the degrees they’re majoring in don’t make enough money.
According to the Los Angeles Times, on Wednesday, the Education Department — which, as you all know, is run by a woman who doesn’t know basic history, has never worked directly as an educator, and thought AI was A1, like the steak sauce — has finalized a rule that will force schools to prove that the loans students are taking out are earning them high-paying jobs. So, basically, people seeking degrees in social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, music, drama and theatre, cosmetic certification programs, liberal arts, and, of course, education need not apply.
“We need social workers,” American Council on Education Ted Mitchell told the Times. “Whether it’s the fentanyl epidemic or homelessness in L.A., we need people who can work on the street with people who need it the most.”
We also need philosophers, critical thinkers, educators, artists, journalists, academics, musicians, music producers, and, above all, for people to have the resources and access to pursue any degree that would aid them in attaining their careers of choice, not just careers that make them good millionaires and billionaires or good worker bees for millionaires and billionaires.
But MAGA conservatives want laborers, not thinkers. They want capitalists, not people who are educated and free-thinking enough to effectively challenge that economic system. And, of course, the last thing conservatives want is for people to choose careers that might lead them to become activists.
It’s also worth noting that adding religious studies to the list of degrees people can’t get federal loans for is the kind of thing that might make this policy unpopular with some in the MAGA world. For example, Gregory Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nonprofit that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a designated hate group, told the Times, “The government shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money.”
This kind of policy is what we should expect from an administration that arbitrarily drops school desegregation cases, cancels hundreds of millions in HBCU grants, persistently attacks diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in colleges, while just plain lying about what DEI does, pushes far-right ideology that masquerades as “patriotic” education, while labeling everything else “indoctrination,” transfers student loans to the control of the Treasury Department as part of its mission to defund the Department of Education, removes non-whitewashed Black history from all federal institutions of learning, and threatens non-federal institutions that refuse to do the same.
So, how will the administration determine which degrees are worth loans and which aren’t? Well, according to the DOE, it will use IRS data to determine students’ salaries four years after they graduate and compare them to those of people in the same age range who only have high school diplomas. According to the International Business Times, the department estimates that 93% of cosmetology certificate programs subject to the test will fail, as will any degrees related to the arts.
The government is also directing colleges to send it data on every course they offer by Oct. 1.
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