On April 17, the Education Department proposed a rule that would strip federal student loan eligibility from college programs whose graduates earn less than the average high school graduate. The rule is designed both to protect taxpayers from wasting government money on worthless programs, and to protect families from going into debt to attend college programs that leave them financially worse off than before.
As Campus Reform explains, “Under the proposal, the federal government would now compare the earnings of graduates from each academic program to the earnings of people with less education. However, if a graduate from an undergraduate program makes less money than the average high school graduate, that program would lose access to federal student loan privileges. ”
Graduate degree programs “whose graduates make less than those with just a bachelor’s degree would also lose access.”
“Pell Grants could also be affected,” Campus Reform says. “The Education Department also highlights that the proposed rule is in response to the fact that ‘the federal student loan portfolio approaches $1.7 trillion and more students are left financially worse off than if they had never attended college.'”
The Education Department says the rule barring wasteful programs from federal financial aid “will better protect students and taxpayers by requiring institutions to sunset programs that do not deliver a strong financial return or to seek funding outside the federal financial aid system.”
Students benefit from some college degrees, but not others. Many master’s degrees don’t pay for themselves. Economist Preston Cooper explains which ones pay off.
The average college student has an IQ of 102, compared to the average American IQ of about 98. The average IQ of young adults who don’t go to college is about 94. So college students would be more intelligent than the average person, even if they had never gone to college.
College students used to have a much higher average IQ (around 117), back when only the brightest or wealthiest people went to college. As science writer Rolf Degen notes, a recent study in Frontiers of Psychology shows “the average IQ of undergraduate students… declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year” since the mid-20th Century as a higher fraction of the population enrolled in college.
The benefits of college are a combination of some students actually learning something useful, and others signaling to an employer that they at least were smart enough to get in to a selective college, or diligent enough to graduate, even if they didn’t actually learn much of use in college. Many students learn little in college and can’t write coherently even when they graduate. Almost half of the nation’s undergraduates learned almost nothing in their first two years in college, according to a study 15 years ago by New York University’s Richard Arum and others. Thirty-six percent learned little even by graduation.
