Why not, assuming that they are talented and can get into a good program? Doesn’t art enrich society? Seems unfair that these careers should be restricted to those born into family wealth. It would be a tiny amount of money to subsidize these things and much better than a lot of the other stuff the government spends money on.
I'm not opposed to Trump's program in principle, but it seems poorly designed on a technical level. My main concern is that, while it seems to make sense that you want someone with a degree or certificate to be making more than someone without that degree or certificate, you are somewhat comparing apples to oranges.
Specifically, the test doesn't compare someone getting a cosmetology certificate to what that same person would get without it, it is comparing it to what anyone without a college degree or certificate makes. However, that latter group includes people in skilled trades who can actually make decent money, while the person getting the cosmetology degree may never have realistically gone down that route.
Imagine a woman who is essentially stuck making minimum wage (about $15k in some states), who isn't about to become a plumber any time soon, but for whom a $10k a cosmetology certificate could mean they are now making $28k. That program would very likely be worth it (especially with licensing rules), but would probably fail the test.
And the program can't help itself by being cheap. Even if you think the $10k program in the above hypothetical isn't worth it, maybe a $5k program would be, but the test treats both the same.
The tax cheat thing is also not imaginary. For something like cosmetology, it isn't crazy to think that people aren't reporting all their tips (or cash payments). This will also artificially deflate the value of a cosmetology degree vs. an average that includes unionized plumbers.
I support the general idea behind this, but I think I would have focused more on something loan debt-to-income or default rate.
Here’s a very good example of a major problem with the current information environment.
The background of the Obama- and Biden-era rules and the background of for-profit college regulation is required background to make sense of this new rule. It’s a little complex, but nothing you can’t describe in a few short paragraphs (as MY does here).
Yet, the New Republic article doesn’t mention these pieces of background information. The purpose is not to inform the reader of the new policy, but to get people angry at an administration. And while I agree that this administration is highly irresponsible, I do not read the news to confirm this belief, but rather to get information with proper context so I can make my own assessment. Even for opinion pieces, where the author is providing an assessment rather than just reporting news, it’s important to provide such essential context. It establishes trust better the writer and the reader.
This is such an important point, although I think it’s been a problem for quite a while. It’s increasingly hard to find factual information about public policy. Sometimes the headlines don’t reflect what’s in the article, but sometimes the whole article is disingenuous or oblivious to the context. I’ve come to rely almost entirely on newsletters.
I once had a pretty reputable university try to scam me via LinkedIn into taking an Executive MBA program unrelated to my field; they pulled out a lot of stops like offering to have me be on an “advisory board” only to later reveal that this would mean taking (and paying for) the program…
Times are tough but I really dislike this grubby moneymaking aspect of higher ed. We ought to be subsidizing legitimate academic programs a lot more even if they aren’t high-earning so that people not born to family wealth can try to get those careers because there are spillover effects from the interesting research produced, but need to be discriminating against these scams. Maybe have a sortitoned board of renowned academics make the calls instead of applying a strict income rule, idk.
It’s really frustrating when Trump and company stumbles into the correct policy decision (holding all programs to student loan standards), because their motives are just so malicious.
I haven’t read the final rule but the initial policy proposals included nursing.
The issue is that the admin isn’t sensitive to the fact that private schools offer the same degree as public schools for a high multiple of the price…. But people still need (much smaller) loans to get a MSSW, NP, or what have you to get that degree from a state school.
Granting that this policy is a real response to a real problem, I’m still left wondering about Matt’s lack of response to the literal criticism about collateral damage (“degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest”), and his own negative polarization against higher ed doesn’t make me comfortable. If this ends community college social work or humanities degrees, that seems bad even if you can still get them at Oberlin.
Tricky thing with ISA's, income-based repayment, etc is they are expensive for careers with high (engineers, nurses) and much cheaper for careers with low earnings - so the natural equilibrium is that only low-earning careers choose them. And in that case, they are just a straight taxpayer subsidy to low-earning degrees.
I don’t like them even for higher earning careers. Seems like a perfect opportunity for predatory lending firms to take advantage of a smart but desperate / poor 18-year old to loan them money in exchange for a lifetime of payments.
It's both disgraceful and predictable that Congress hasn't fixed this. Congress is broken, and the filibuster is the main reason.
High school civics says the filibuster requires consensus and protects minorities. In the real world, it handcuffs Congress, creates a power vacuum, and cedes power to the states, the president, and private actors.
The filibuster kept anti-lynching legislation from passing until 2022 and kept the Civil Rights Act off the books until 1964. Meanwhile, local elites used private and state-level power, sometimes violently, to get their way.
The filibuster is like a toll booth. Set the toll too high and traffic goes around it. Some drivers take undivided back roads and crash more often. The DREAM Act got 55 votes and died. It came back as DACA, escalating presidential rule by decree. Now Trump really does rule by decree, and Congress is too supine to restrain him. We are retracing the early steps of the feud between Marius and Sulla. If the presidency is the real prize, people storm the Capitol to keep it
Where is your evidence that the filibuster has anything to do with this? Did a relevant bill pass the House, but fail in the Senate?
>Now Trump really does rule by decree, and Congress is too supine to restrain him.
The source of that problem seems to be the veto.
And, "making it harder to pass laws" is not inherently a bad thing. It is more often a good thing. 1. It helps restrain the tyranny of the majority. 2. It can me more democratic.* There are times when one party has a majority of the House despite get a minority of the total House vote, and of course 51 Senate votes can represent 1/3 of the population.
*Here, I am using democratic to be synonymous with majoritarian. But those are not actually synonyms. There are non-majoritarian forms of democracy which the filibuster might enhance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consociationalism
This was kind of a fascinating timeline, from Obama implementing the rule, to Trump 1 repealing it, Biden implementing a tougher rule than Obama, to Trump 2 more or less keeping the Biden rule.
Listening to Beutler on the Politix podcast and seeing the partisan framing for this largely nonpartisan issue is a good reminder that for many people, the point of politics is for My Team to Win — actual policy implications are a complete afterthought.
So on Twitter social workers and education are really the center of the argument. And it’s frustrating because a few states really do require a master’s degree and have pay low enough that some people may fall behind the rule here.
I don’t really know how to make the state politics of public service more sensible. I mean I work with social workers as part of the foster system and they’re doing really awful work that does require a lot of knowledge about dealing with people in level ten crises and people meet the claims of low pay with they should just require an associate’s degree like it’s not a genuinely intellectually demanding field.
The requirement for master’s degrees in education seems quite silly especially in states that can’t hire enough teachers. New York and Pennsylvania both are rather difficult to get started in but pay well for careerists.
I don’t know how big of a problem the public service sector is but the program which is supposed to ameliorate this pslf is ran so poorly it was a nightmare to navigate under Trump 1. I eventually got loans forgiven but it took me something like 3 years of going back and forth with paperwork.
The issue with social work is schools like USC were basically hunting down low income low information students who didn’t realize they could get the same masters degree from a cal state for 5% of the price.
To a lot of low information people, they have a mistaken norm that “private” must be better than public, and no one really to inform them that that is not the case
I’m pretty sure the requirement for masters degrees in education originated with teacher unions. I’m not commenting here on whether the requirement is a good or bad thing.
The providers of the service should be on the hook for part of the loan repayment. That would have two salutory effects. a) They would be more selective about who received the loan. b) They would be more juditious in ensuring that their services were efficatious in producing income for the persons receiving the loans. If we did that, the providers would probably have policies like the rule. There would be not need for a one-size fits all way to improve the ROR of student loans. For example putting provicers on the hook would get at the amount of debt problem. In terms of b) above, they would look at the cost and benefit of a program, not just the benefit.
This might be on net a good idea but if you had providers being more selective then you’d get a lot of articles in a lot of media outlets bemoaning the unequal access to student loan financing.
“Recently, though, the piece got quite a bit of attention”
Yet another in a string of minor stories that trigger typical culture war fights being elevated by algorithms to the top of the national conversation.
Go figure.
This is properly seen as the same problem as student loan forgiveness.
For years, people in my socials have been complaining about burdensome loans that cripple them financially for decades.
Sometimes they even imply that it's immoral to ask an eighteen-year-old to agree to such a thing.
I think they have it right, and we are helping young adults by not offering them these loans.
If somebody has their own money to spend on a fine arts degree, great! I wish them the best.
If they don't, I we certainly shouldn't ask the government to pay for it. Society is not better off for their fine arts training.
Nor should we tempt them to indulge their muse, at the price of not being able to afford a house for 20 years.
Why not, assuming that they are talented and can get into a good program? Doesn’t art enrich society? Seems unfair that these careers should be restricted to those born into family wealth. It would be a tiny amount of money to subsidize these things and much better than a lot of the other stuff the government spends money on.
I'm not opposed to Trump's program in principle, but it seems poorly designed on a technical level. My main concern is that, while it seems to make sense that you want someone with a degree or certificate to be making more than someone without that degree or certificate, you are somewhat comparing apples to oranges.
Specifically, the test doesn't compare someone getting a cosmetology certificate to what that same person would get without it, it is comparing it to what anyone without a college degree or certificate makes. However, that latter group includes people in skilled trades who can actually make decent money, while the person getting the cosmetology degree may never have realistically gone down that route.
Imagine a woman who is essentially stuck making minimum wage (about $15k in some states), who isn't about to become a plumber any time soon, but for whom a $10k a cosmetology certificate could mean they are now making $28k. That program would very likely be worth it (especially with licensing rules), but would probably fail the test.
And the program can't help itself by being cheap. Even if you think the $10k program in the above hypothetical isn't worth it, maybe a $5k program would be, but the test treats both the same.
The tax cheat thing is also not imaginary. For something like cosmetology, it isn't crazy to think that people aren't reporting all their tips (or cash payments). This will also artificially deflate the value of a cosmetology degree vs. an average that includes unionized plumbers.
I support the general idea behind this, but I think I would have focused more on something loan debt-to-income or default rate.
Here’s a very good example of a major problem with the current information environment.
The background of the Obama- and Biden-era rules and the background of for-profit college regulation is required background to make sense of this new rule. It’s a little complex, but nothing you can’t describe in a few short paragraphs (as MY does here).
Yet, the New Republic article doesn’t mention these pieces of background information. The purpose is not to inform the reader of the new policy, but to get people angry at an administration. And while I agree that this administration is highly irresponsible, I do not read the news to confirm this belief, but rather to get information with proper context so I can make my own assessment. Even for opinion pieces, where the author is providing an assessment rather than just reporting news, it’s important to provide such essential context. It establishes trust better the writer and the reader.
This is such an important point, although I think it’s been a problem for quite a while. It’s increasingly hard to find factual information about public policy. Sometimes the headlines don’t reflect what’s in the article, but sometimes the whole article is disingenuous or oblivious to the context. I’ve come to rely almost entirely on newsletters.
I once had a pretty reputable university try to scam me via LinkedIn into taking an Executive MBA program unrelated to my field; they pulled out a lot of stops like offering to have me be on an “advisory board” only to later reveal that this would mean taking (and paying for) the program…
Times are tough but I really dislike this grubby moneymaking aspect of higher ed. We ought to be subsidizing legitimate academic programs a lot more even if they aren’t high-earning so that people not born to family wealth can try to get those careers because there are spillover effects from the interesting research produced, but need to be discriminating against these scams. Maybe have a sortitoned board of renowned academics make the calls instead of applying a strict income rule, idk.
It’s really frustrating when Trump and company stumbles into the correct policy decision (holding all programs to student loan standards), because their motives are just so malicious.
I haven’t read the final rule but the initial policy proposals included nursing.
The issue is that the admin isn’t sensitive to the fact that private schools offer the same degree as public schools for a high multiple of the price…. But people still need (much smaller) loans to get a MSSW, NP, or what have you to get that degree from a state school.
Honestly undergrad student loan debt is nbd.
Granting that this policy is a real response to a real problem, I’m still left wondering about Matt’s lack of response to the literal criticism about collateral damage (“degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest”), and his own negative polarization against higher ed doesn’t make me comfortable. If this ends community college social work or humanities degrees, that seems bad even if you can still get them at Oberlin.
"social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music"
Why are these disproportionately worth federal money?
They aren't _disproportionately_ worth federal money, they are worth federal money similarly to other programs.
But if these programs load students up with debt they cannot pay, then there are real social harms.
Nobody is banning the programs, just preventing them from getting funded by federal student loans, right?
Income share agreements are another interesting idea for financing college tuition that appeals to my econ brain: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-1-5-trillion-question-how-to-fix-student-loan-debt-ep-377/
One of the reasons they never took off is to CFPB classified ISAs as loans.
I suspect the real reason these haven’t taken off is that they just seem really icky, like you’re selling an equity stake in yourself.
Tricky thing with ISA's, income-based repayment, etc is they are expensive for careers with high (engineers, nurses) and much cheaper for careers with low earnings - so the natural equilibrium is that only low-earning careers choose them. And in that case, they are just a straight taxpayer subsidy to low-earning degrees.
I don’t like them even for higher earning careers. Seems like a perfect opportunity for predatory lending firms to take advantage of a smart but desperate / poor 18-year old to loan them money in exchange for a lifetime of payments.
It's both disgraceful and predictable that Congress hasn't fixed this. Congress is broken, and the filibuster is the main reason.
High school civics says the filibuster requires consensus and protects minorities. In the real world, it handcuffs Congress, creates a power vacuum, and cedes power to the states, the president, and private actors.
The filibuster kept anti-lynching legislation from passing until 2022 and kept the Civil Rights Act off the books until 1964. Meanwhile, local elites used private and state-level power, sometimes violently, to get their way.
The filibuster is like a toll booth. Set the toll too high and traffic goes around it. Some drivers take undivided back roads and crash more often. The DREAM Act got 55 votes and died. It came back as DACA, escalating presidential rule by decree. Now Trump really does rule by decree, and Congress is too supine to restrain him. We are retracing the early steps of the feud between Marius and Sulla. If the presidency is the real prize, people storm the Capitol to keep it
Where is your evidence that the filibuster has anything to do with this? Did a relevant bill pass the House, but fail in the Senate?
>Now Trump really does rule by decree, and Congress is too supine to restrain him.
The source of that problem seems to be the veto.
And, "making it harder to pass laws" is not inherently a bad thing. It is more often a good thing. 1. It helps restrain the tyranny of the majority. 2. It can me more democratic.* There are times when one party has a majority of the House despite get a minority of the total House vote, and of course 51 Senate votes can represent 1/3 of the population.
*Here, I am using democratic to be synonymous with majoritarian. But those are not actually synonyms. There are non-majoritarian forms of democracy which the filibuster might enhance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consociationalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lani_Guinier
This was kind of a fascinating timeline, from Obama implementing the rule, to Trump 1 repealing it, Biden implementing a tougher rule than Obama, to Trump 2 more or less keeping the Biden rule.
The big difference between the Trump rule and the Obama/Biden rule is that it includes non-profit institutions.
As it should
Listening to Beutler on the Politix podcast and seeing the partisan framing for this largely nonpartisan issue is a good reminder that for many people, the point of politics is for My Team to Win — actual policy implications are a complete afterthought.
I love the genre of jurisprudence that amounts to “my client is innocent because he’s a scumbag”.
So on Twitter social workers and education are really the center of the argument. And it’s frustrating because a few states really do require a master’s degree and have pay low enough that some people may fall behind the rule here.
I don’t really know how to make the state politics of public service more sensible. I mean I work with social workers as part of the foster system and they’re doing really awful work that does require a lot of knowledge about dealing with people in level ten crises and people meet the claims of low pay with they should just require an associate’s degree like it’s not a genuinely intellectually demanding field.
The requirement for master’s degrees in education seems quite silly especially in states that can’t hire enough teachers. New York and Pennsylvania both are rather difficult to get started in but pay well for careerists.
I don’t know how big of a problem the public service sector is but the program which is supposed to ameliorate this pslf is ran so poorly it was a nightmare to navigate under Trump 1. I eventually got loans forgiven but it took me something like 3 years of going back and forth with paperwork.
The issue with social work is schools like USC were basically hunting down low income low information students who didn’t realize they could get the same masters degree from a cal state for 5% of the price.
I feel like that is saying damning things about the people deciding to go into social work.
To a lot of low information people, they have a mistaken norm that “private” must be better than public, and no one really to inform them that that is not the case
I’m pretty sure the requirement for masters degrees in education originated with teacher unions. I’m not commenting here on whether the requirement is a good or bad thing.
A teacher with a masters in education has repeatedly shown no difference in outcomes compared to one with a bachelors in multiple studies.
So yeah, bad thing
Because unions use graduate degrees as requirements for promotion a whole industry of credentialing mills have emerged.
The providers of the service should be on the hook for part of the loan repayment. That would have two salutory effects. a) They would be more selective about who received the loan. b) They would be more juditious in ensuring that their services were efficatious in producing income for the persons receiving the loans. If we did that, the providers would probably have policies like the rule. There would be not need for a one-size fits all way to improve the ROR of student loans. For example putting provicers on the hook would get at the amount of debt problem. In terms of b) above, they would look at the cost and benefit of a program, not just the benefit.
This might be on net a good idea but if you had providers being more selective then you’d get a lot of articles in a lot of media outlets bemoaning the unequal access to student loan financing.