Late last year, the Education Department publicly released the typical student debt and starting salary for graduates of thousands of higher education programs nationwide. A new interactive tool from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) puts this data to innovative use, showing where the typical student’s debt burden is high relative to her earnings. It’s a useful tool for students, but it also exposes the hypocrisy and limitations of past federal government approaches to accountability for the colleges and universities that soak up billions in taxpayer dollars every year.
TPPF’s analysis mirrors that of an Obama-era regulation, the Gainful Employment rule. This regulation aimed to penalize colleges and programs where earnings after graduation were too low to justify the typical student’s debt burden. Though the Trump administration repealed the regulation before its penalties could take effect, colleges nonetheless shuttered many educational programs which “failed” the rule.