A few weeks ago the US Department of Education proposed judging eligibility for college student loan programs by what college graduates of those programs typically earn. Whole departments would be cut off from student loans under this rule. The arts programs that would fail under this test read like a list of the country’s crown jewels. Juilliard’s music degrees. Yale’s MFA. Harvard’s museum studies. Programs whose graduates, by the nature of the field they’re in, don’t clear the earnings bar that would keep their students eligible for federal loans.
This idea could wipe out entire fields of study, particularly in the arts. Yale and Juilliard and Harvard can afford to subsidize tuition at whatever level. But for hundreds of other programs at colleges and universities around the country, the squeeze on applications could be terminal at a time the demographic cliff is already impacting enrollment.
This is what happens when you insist on using a scale that doesn’t measure the thing a system is built to measure. For example, in the early 1990s New York and Pennsylvania started publishing cardiac surgeons’ mortality rates, a scorecard of patient deaths per operation. But mortality rate isn’t lives saved, it’s a ratio, and the fastest way to improve a ratio is to refuse the hardest cases. Surgeons began turning away the sickest patients and the metric improved while the thing it was supposed to prevent — cardiac deaths — got worse.
As repellant an idea as this new student loan edict seems at first look, the Trump metric isn’t crazy. Loading up a 22-year-old with $100,000 or more of debt for a degree that maybe earns $30,000 a year is a prescription for a life sentence of debt.
And this idea isn’t entirely a Trump invention. The logic of earnings-as-eligibility has been around for fifteen years. Obama’s “gainful employment” rule, for for-profit colleges and certificate programs that crushed students with disproportionately high debt and low earnings, was finalized in 2014, and first tied federal aid to a debt-to-earnings test. The 2015 College Scorecard made graduate earnings the most prominent factor for judging a degree.
Washington Monthly this spring called the Trump administration’s current proposal “Trump’s one good education reform.” This policy says so much both about how we’ve come to regard education as transactional, and in what we as a society value. There’s a real and obvious problem here that these administrations have felt the need to address: College has become too expensive.
What’s new in this Trump version is only the scope — extending the earnings test from career- and for-profit programs to nearly all education. In the process, it has decided that educational value is to be measured by economic return.
This notion that the ultimate measure of American education is economic is an impoverishing one. We measure for success. If that measure is earnings then we optimize for earnings. Social value measured on an earnings scale doesn’t just get deprioritized, it doesn’t exist. But we need that social value. So we “subsidize” it, turning it into charity that can’t exist on its own. Then the conservative mindset spins those subsidies as luxuries we can’t afford, so there’s ongoing pressure to eliminate them. What began as a values debate becomes a fiscal debate argued around a measurement scale that doesn’t measure values. If you’re in the arts, this argument should sound very familiar.
That same week, the administration moved to dismantle federal funding for social-science research, the fields that study how a society sees itself. And it also began dismantling a $368 million network of buoys in the ocean deployed a decade ago to monitor the health of the world’s oceans. Not just deactivate. Dismantle.
Why destroy critical state-of-the-art technology? This isn’t hostility to knowledge, it’s engineered blindness, constructed to eliminate values arguments. It’s much more difficult to argue climate change if you aren’t monitoring it at scale. In the absence of social science research, your arguments against ideology weaken. And making it more difficult for students to study the arts means less of that messy social values stuff. Get the policy tweaks right and the whole system of arts, social- and climate-science infrastructure collapses.
Consider what we actually lose in the case of the arts. Not “the arts,” as if these were a luxury good. We lose a place where the skills of public discourse and interaction get practiced. The capacity to consider a perspective that isn’t yours, to disagree with someone without their ceasing to be a person to you, to tolerate ambiguity long enough to think. These are practiced skills, not innate ones, and the arts are one of the places where a society still does this. Theater is a place where strangers get to experience the same thing at the same moment and then argue about what it meant. That’s civic muscle that we need.
A coarse, brutal society isn’t the product of bad people. It’s the product of a culture that hasn’t exercised the muscle of civic engagement to hash out values and priorities and capacity. A culture that doesn’t have the infrastructure to work that muscle devolves into an everyone-for-themselves spiral that loses the capacity to invest in the common good.
And here’s what’s so frustrating. The American public broadly believes in education, believes in the value of science, and depends on agencies such as FEMA and the VA and environmental agencies that protect us.
Yet we keep reaching for the wrong arguments. A survey released a few weeks ago found that 79 percent of Americans believe cities that invest in creative-industry education will do better economically, not worse (again an argument for the arts that insists on establishing worth with the economic argument, but whatever…). Even so, people intuit that the capacity to make meaning is not a frill, it’s the foundation everything else is built on. In an education policy system that makes graduate earnings the determinative scale as to what gets supported, though, these other values and qualities are no longer even part of the debate.
After heavy bipartisan lobbying by US senators, the buoy destruction was stopped. But the Trump administration strategy of eliminating programs and departments and institutions it doesn’t like isn’t about saving money or failures of mission. It’s about decapitating arguments by disappearing the bodies.
Culture is not a season of shows. It’s not a set of fancy buildings selling tickets. It’s the way a society transmits its character across generations — its arguments, its norms, its ability to experience a shared “we” together long enough to mean something. Science doesn’t stop sciencing if you stop measuring things like climate change. You can’t measure these kinds of investment in a debt-to-earnings scale. Which is exactly why, if the only thing we can measure is the paycheck, we will keep voting to defund the things that make a country worth the paycheck.
We won’t recover from this by winning the earnings argument. We recover by insisting there are more important ways to measure value.
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