THE MORNING RANT: Trump’s Education Department Cuts Off Low-Paying Degrees from Federal Student Loan Program – Exploitative Universities Hardest Hit

Universities have been enriching themselves by financially exploiting naive teenagers with unconscionable levels of student debt. It is evil how the predators in financial aid offices have been saddling teenagers with six-figure debt loads for degrees that won’t even produce jobs that can repay those loans.

President Trump is finally pushing back on this abuse. His Department of Education is going to use IRS data to gauge income for the first four years after graduation. For degrees that don’t produce a baseline compensation equal to high school graduates’ income, those degrees will no longer be eligible for federal student loans. These targeted degrees will likely include social work, teaching, and various artistic degrees.

The left’s loyalty to the education cartel has them up in arms, as if this action is punishing social workers and teachers rather than protecting them. The New Republic echoes this view, ”While the Trump administration is framing the policy as ‘accountability’ for higher education, and some are welcoming the move, others see it as an attack on those whose work is important regardless of salary.”

This is actually just the opposite. Rather than being “an attack on those whose work is important regardless of salary,” Trump’s actions will stop the exploitation of those students by universities loading them up with debt.

It is also exploitative that many of these low-paying jobs require Masters degrees. While there is a real-world need for social workers, it is beyond preposterous that a social worker must have six years of higher education to get the masters degree necessary for a clinical position. An engineering, architecture, or accounting degree doesn’t require that much class time. It may feel flattering to a social worker that the job is deemed so important that it requires a masters-level education, but the reality is that the social worker is being bankrupted by a corrupt system.

Be it social work, teaching, accounting, or finance, there is no need for the legacy university model. I have hired plenty of people with accounting and finance degrees over the years. They went through the very expensive four-year (or longer) college credentialing process, even though they only took a handful of classes specific to their degree. A much better system would be specialized schools providing the core education in just 12 or 18 months. (Much of this could obviously be done online.) As for the fine arts, it is well past time to divorce them from universities and bring back conservatories.

The commercial pilot training pipeline is already pretty much divorced from universities, and it works well. It is not necessary to have a college degree to become a commercial airline pilot, and it is possible to get all the training, certification, and flight hours that are necessary within two years. Yes, there is a cost, perhaps $100k or so, but this compares favorably to the cost of college, especially when considering the compensation once employed. Entry-level pay for a commuter pilot is now about $90k, rising to about $200K as a First Officer at a major airline, and much higher than that when Captain level is achieved.

Trump’s ban on providing student loans for degrees that lead to low-wage careers is a start. The next step is to eliminate all federally-backed student loans. If universities believe that their students should be taking on debt to get a degree, those schools can go ahead and guaranty privately-funded student loans.

But what about “the college experience?” It should be considered another artifact of the post-war 20th Century. No matter how nostalgic Boomers and Gen-Xers may be about their college years, the modern version of “the college experience” (e.g. overpriced political indoctrination by day, and intoxicant-fueled bacchanal by night) is not worth the suffocating debt burden that will impede homeownership, family formation, and wealth accumulation.

Throckmorton’s First Law of Live Music: “If There’s an Upright Bass in the Band, It’s Probably Going to be Good”

If you were online over the weekend, there’s a good chance that Buddy Mac (the Ten-Gallon Troubadour) found his way into your feed.

If you haven’t heard him yet, take a listen to this short clip and you’ll understand why Buddy and his voice have gone viral, stirring a blood memory of America’s heritage for so many Americans.

I was in college in the ‘80s when I saw a campy cowboy band named Riders in the Sky perform at the university’s student union, bringing old western music to a new audience. The Riders have since become beloved members of the Grand Old Opry, but they are no longer young buckaroos. I wondered if anyone would come along with a style that could keep that music alive. I think we’ve found our man.

Here is another great clip of Buddy Mac performing with his band, The Ten-Gallon Troubadors.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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