> But this new test, known as "do no harm," raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money?

If this is a fair question to ask students, then it is a fair question to ask the schools as well. They are the ones charging enormous amounts of money to students for this.

This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from taking out enormous loans for it.

Gut feeling here is that this is going to result in significantly lower higher ed enrollment, and therefore a less educated populace.

We do not teach history or ethics, or much in general to our pipeline welders, but they make bank. Meanwhile our well educated teachers are paid nearly nothing. Both are needed (teachers arguably more so).

Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system. This will pull up the ladder on the younger generations.

We need a solution that both increases educational access and quality everyone regardless of their career path, while also lowering tuition costs. This does not achieve that.

imo this is pants on head backwards. The whole problem with the current university system is that it has become exclusively a credentialing system that everyone uses to justify higher salaries. We’ve completely left the education part of it by the wayside…except for the liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn! This rule is just encoding the existing tulip mania into federal law directly, by making it clear that the ONLY reason one goes to school is for future $$$

I feel like I have not really heard a compelling reason why student debt should not be dischargeable thru bankruptcy like (afaik) all other forms of debt. I am curious what the ramifications would be if higher education institutions had to (in some form) co-sign the debt being issued.

I do get that not all education should be purely for economic reasons, but as an autodidact I feel that "learning for the sake of learning" does not need to come with the prices that people are paying for degrees.

> If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers

Wouldn't this punish a huge number of students who struggle academically, by comparing them against better-achievers who simply skipped school?

The two populations being compared are entirely different for a lot of schools. Just because the average student skipping college does better than the average student attending a particular college, that doesn't mean the average one that attended college would've done as well as the average one that skipped.

I'm all for informed consent - publish the data - but leave the choice to the individual. The goal of education is self-improvement, not necessarily/only money.

The way student debt is (mis)managed is a different issue.

Hopefully this will revamp the educational system in such a way that the pejoratively named "trade schools" can confer bachelor's degrees on their graduates as well.

I don't really see why some no name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing. They honestly have more of a right to do so.

This is not great. The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job. That's certainly a nice side-effect and I hope that all my students will be able to support themselves through good employment. The university is there to educate you, not train you. It's to turn you into a better thinker, a better person, and someone more capable of living well.

Making art and humanities programs demonstrate some kind of pecuniary benefit is disgusting and myopic. My wife pursued English because she loves writing. She's earned about 0 dollars from that degree because she's home with our kids. And that's OK! Our lives are so much richer because of her degree—as well as the classes I took from the English department. So we should penalize the humanities because it merely makes people better thinkers and doesn't have as high of an ROI as an MBA? Yuck!

(EDIT: the article does mention that this bar is low—so not too bad—but the fact that this is a metric and criteria in the first place opens this up to abuse in the near future.)

I get that it's intended to cut down on ballooning tuition and fees, but *this is not the right way to do that.* (Actually, if we eliminated half the administration, I wonder how much we could cut costs…)

Holy shit this is a great idea. I get the complaints about the arts, but colleges have enjoyed essentially unlimited patience for larding up their programs with extra fees, bullshit credit requirements, and more, for decades.

I don't personally think that efficiency should be the primary concern of colleges, but it should be a concern, and it just plain hasn't been for ages. And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students. "You can't complain about being require to take a 100-level history course because our job is to turn out renaissance scholars who can debate philosophy at cocktail parties before going to work doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with that."

All the while, those additional credit hours cost students a shitload of money and debt and take focus away from their actual fields of study.

Colleges and universities need a kick up the ass to make them actually give a shit about outcomes for their students. I'm not going to cry that they're getting one.

Clock hour schools have been held to this standard forever. It’s called gainful employment. It was always bullshit that credit hour schools didn’t have this standard, as if it was 1930 and colleges were here to help us think thoughts rather than as part of the jobs pipeline.

Easy, make non college folks worse off.

With all the layoffs I wonder how that will turn out

This is great. Those bullshit degrees are example of externalising costs and capturing profits.

Although, unfortunately, I suspect that this will be gamed by things like “this is super unique diploma” and there are no pros on market yet. Rotate that every 5 years and voila. I’m sure that every smart people are already thinking about schemes much more elaborate

This is wonderful. Hopefully this is an extinction level event for all of the toxic degree factories that were created just to take advantage of the non-dischargeable student loans. US tuition almost tripled in the last 15 years but the quality of education didn’t triple.

Trump himself took advantage of this by creating Trump university which was a for-profit degree mill.

All of those “schools” needs to be wiped off the map and hopefully get replaced by schools that show real value.