Rachel Abrams: From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is the Daily. Today, as the cost of higher education has soared in recent decades, universities have attracted more scrutiny about the value of a 4-year degree. Now, the Trump administration is taking those questions to the next level with a new set of policies that scale back the federal government's student loan program. Today I talk to my colleague Ron Lieber who writes about personal finance about what these new changes are and how they might reshape higher education in America. It's Wednesday, July 1st.

Rachel Abrams: So Ron, we have talked a lot on the show about how the administration has really focused on higher education. There have been concerns about anti-semitism on campus. The administration has accused a lot of different schools of being, as it describes, too woke. But you cover personal finance and you have been following a very different set of developments when it comes to higher education, which go into effect today, July 1st. So tell us what has been going on.

Ron Lieber: Sure. So, the federal government put into place some changes to the way it lends money for higher education. I mean, there's $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, and that's more than credit card debt. It's more than auto loans. And you'll probably remember that there was this giant pause in the repayment of student loans. It happened at the beginning of the pandemic, but it went on for years. And since then, the Trump administration has been trying to revise the federal government's repayment plans to make them a bit stricter. And some of those changes went into effect today. So, that's going to be a big change for families who are in the process of paying off student loans. But there's an even bigger change that the administration also put into place, which is that instead of focusing solely on cancelling student debt or changing up the repayment plans, they are also trying to reduce the amount of loans that are given out in the first place.

Rachel Abrams: So what specifically is the government doing to try to achieve that goal?

Ron Lieber: So two things are happening that just went into effect. The first thing is that there are going to be caps on certain kinds of federal loans. First of all, there's this thing called the plus loan. Parents take that one out on behalf of their undergraduate students. Grandparents sometimes do it too. And they do it when that student's financial aid package, if any, is not enough to cover the cost.

Rachel Abrams: And then there are the loans for graduate students. And up until this point, there have been very few limits on the amount of money that you can borrow.

Ron Lieber: You borrow whatever you want—

Rachel Abrams: —up to the cost of attendance, which includes room and board. You know, it can be over $100,000 per year, right? And now parents are only going to be able to borrow a certain amount of money per year and a certain amount of money over time through the entire process of completing a degree. And then graduate students who are borrowing for themselves are going to have a different set of caps. And I know that there are probably a lot of nuances here, but just really generally speaking, can you give us a rough idea of what the caps are for grad students and from the parents borrowing for their undergrad children?

Ron Lieber: Yeah, so let's start with those parents. The cap is $20,000 a year for those federal loans that parents can get access to. And then the total limit over time, might be four years, might be more depending on how long the kid takes to get through. That's $65,000 total,

Rachel Abrams: which is not a whole lot if you consider the fact that some universities charge that just for one year of school,

Ron Lieber: right? So, now over to those grad students. If you are in, you know, one of those standard master's degree programs or, you know, other programs that are deemed nonprofessional, you're limited to $20,500 per year. And the aggregate total that you're allowed to borrow is $100,000. And then there are so-called professional programs. So those are things like business school, dental school, law school, medical school. They're limited to $50,000 a year and $200,000 over time.

Rachel Abrams: Got it. Okay. And we should note that there is ongoing litigation over which of these graduate programs actually qualify as professional and therefore would have that higher cap where people could borrow more. So basically the idea from the administration here is to keep students, keep parents from getting into a situation where they are borrowing essentially way more money than they can pay off.

Ron Lieber: Right. It may seem counterintuitive to think, hey, we're fixing the problem of higher education being too costly here by giving families less in federal loans to pay for the cost. But I think the idea here is to provide more guard rails to keep families from overextending themselves. And then that might drive down prices at least a bit.

Rachel Abrams: How so?

Ron Lieber: Well, if parents and students can't borrow as much, it may make it harder for a lot of the schools to charge what they're charging now. So, schools might need to lower their prices to match whatever it is that the families of the students can actually pay.

Rachel Abrams: Okay. So, you told us that two major buckets of changes were coming. What is the second?

Ron Lieber: So the second big change, the government has said that it does not want to provide student loans anymore to programs whose alumni don't meet a minimum earnings test.

Rachel Abrams: Okay. An earnings test. Explain what that is and how it works.

Ron Lieber: So here's the basic deal. For people who finish their undergraduate program, there's going to be a measurement four years later. And those folks from a particular program must on average earn more than the people in their state who only finished high school and are between the ages of 25 and 34. So the basic bottom line is if you're not earning more than a high school graduate does on average, what has the school done for you?

Rachel Abrams: And more to the point, why is the federal government subsidizing a degree that doesn't put you in any better financial position than a high school student? Is that the idea?

Ron Lieber: Exactly. So this earnings test, it will also be applied to advanced degrees and professional schools. And in that case, the test is similar but with different numbers. It will look at the earnings of alumni four years after graduation to see whether they earn more than the median salary for working adults age 25 to 34 who have a bachelor's degree.

Rachel Abrams: Can you give some examples of programs that might fail this test?

Ron Lieber: Well, I've been looking at a pretty detailed data set of like over 30,000 undergraduate majors at all sorts of different schools. So, undergraduate religion degrees at a lot of schools may end up flunking the test. A whole bunch of fine arts schools with particular degrees and theater programs often end up at the bottom.

Rachel Abrams: Now, let's be clear here. There are not going to be any ramifications for any of this earning stuff for at least 3 years because the way the test is set up is that if a particular institution and its programs don't pass this earnings test in two out of three years, only then will there be consequences and those consequences will be no more access to federal student loans. So the programs may not cease to exist at that point, but if a lot of people in those programs are borrowing a fair amount of money, those people are going to have to figure out some other way to pay for it, and the school's probably going to have to help them.

Rachel Abrams: So we said at the beginning of this conversation, it's no secret that the administration has targeted higher education in various ways. Like for instance, they threatened to cut off or did cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to a bunch of different universities over the last year. And I wonder whether we should be thinking of the changes that you are describing as a kind of continuation of that effort. Like in other words, how much of everything you're describing is political and how much is purely financial?

Ron Lieber: I don't know, Rachel. Let's call it 23% political. Right? If you look at the education department fact sheet that's explaining the rules, it very specifically calls out schools like the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and New York University in New York. I don't think it's a coincidence that those institutions are in big blue cities.

Rachel Abrams: Sure. But there's been bipartisan consensus for a really long time that the student loan program is deeply problematic.

Ron Lieber: and the fact of the matter is is that you know these are taxpayer dollars here and whatever the president may think, whatever Congress may think, there are a growing number of people who are really mad about the amount of borrowing that is required to get this higher education stuff and they feel like there ought to be a way to control the price, right? And so it's possible that this is a medium-sized step towards changing things.

Rachel Abrams: I mean, the more you talk about this, Ron, it actually seems kind of insane that this country ever devised a system where a family or a student could so easily borrow tens of thousands of dollars with basically no strings attached.

Ron Lieber: In retrospect, it seems that way, right? But we're talking about decades of history here that began with some very good intentions.

Rachel Abrams: Okay. So, let's rewind the clock then. Why don't you tell us about how all of this got started and how we got to the point where we're at today?

Ron Lieber: So, 1980, it begins to become clear that a growing number of families were having trouble affording the last couple of thousand dollars each year for tuition, room, and board. Now, let's remember at the time there weren't as many people going to college. There weren't as many low-income people going to college, right? And the federal government felt like, well, okay, if it's just a couple of thousand a year, no big deal, right? We don't need to necessarily put a cap on the amount that people are borrowing. And we also don't really need to do all that much underwriting because these folks are decent credit risks and it's not a high volume of people and it's not a high volume of dollars.

Rachel Abrams: Right. So the sort of vetting that typically happens underwriting when somebody borrows thousands and thousands of dollars like making sure you can pay it back or you have a good credit score or whatever. You're saying that the federal government was not doing much of that.

Ron Lieber: That's correct. So flash forward another 25 years or so. We're in 2005, 2006, and the federal government opens those loans to graduate students. And again, big idea here is, well, these are people getting master's degrees. They're getting professional degrees. These people are really good risks as well.

Rachel Abrams: They're probably going to earn more.

Ron Lieber: Surely they're going to earn more, right? And so there too, there didn't seem to be any need for any severe restrictions. But as time went on, a few problems began to emerge. So first, there are more and more people who are borrowing through these loan programs who were not necessarily the higher income earners that the government originally created some of these programs for. There are more middle-income families, working class families using those parent loans because more and more people start going to college. And then the Dow tumbled more than 500 points after it's 2008, 2009, the Great Recession comes along and these borrowers start running into some trouble.

News clip: Student loans for college just keep climbing.

Ron Lieber: No one expected the economy to take such a hit, leaving a lot of families scrambling. People are losing jobs and they cannot afford to make their payments.

Borrower clip: So, I'm currently making six loan payments every month, which essentially add up to a full mortgage payment. And um I was recently laid off. So,

Ron Lieber: and that's just a terrible look for the federal government. This is bad. And so the other thing that's happening here is as more and more people do borrow, more questions emerge about whether all of this debt is actually fueling rising prices that people are paying to go to these institutions. And there begins to be some evidence that suggests that maybe those two things are connected.

News clip: student loan debt has now surpassed credit card debt for the first time ever.

Ron Lieber: And so 2011 rolls around and the Obama administration takes a look at all this and says, "Hey, um, we need to try and rein this system in a bit, right? So that we have more certainty that the people who are borrowing can actually afford to pay the debt back over time."

Rachel Abrams: Mhm. When a big chunk of every paycheck goes towards student loans instead of being spent on other things, that's not just tough for middle class families, it's painful for the economy. And it's

Ron Lieber: and so his administration tightened the underwriting. And within a year or two, a whole bunch of institutions, including some historically black colleges and universities, were on the brink of going out of business.

Rachel Abrams: Wow.

Ron Lieber: Their borrowers were disproportionately affected here because they were borrowing a lot from this federal parent loan program and once they no longer qualified for new loans, they could no longer afford those institutions.

Rachel Abrams: So what did the administration do?

Ron Lieber: They did what they felt like they had to do and by 2014 they had essentially reversed the changes that they made and kind of made things go back to where they were before. And so borrowing kept going up. And part of the reason it did so is because some of the universities themselves were gaming the system.

Rachel Abrams: We'll be right back.

Rachel Abrams: So, Ron, we're at the moment in the story where the federal government has tried and failed, but some kind of guard rails around education lending, but as you said, the problem kept getting worse. What's going on?

Ron Lieber: So, a couple of things are happening. First of all, the schools and their strategy consultants are realizing that master's degree programs can be pretty profitable, right? If there are no labs involved or you know any expensive infrastructure on behalf of the schools, you can charge a lot of money if you can persuade students that their earnings will go up at the conclusion. And

Ad clip: we're very excited to introduce the Master of Science in Medical Cannabis Science and Therapeutics.

Ron Lieber: Master's degree programs grow and they grow a lot.

Ad clip: We are launching an exciting new one-year masters program, the Masters in Communication and Media Industry. The master of professional studies in user experience design online masters of science and engineering in artificial intelligence. Our master's program in environment and sustainability management the world's first master's degree in happiness studies.

Ron Lieber: So Robert Kelchin, you know, he's one of the most respected higher education researchers out there. He took a look at this and realized that there were 14,000 new master's degree programs that had been created in the last two decades leading up to the middle of this decade.

Rachel Abrams: So the schools are really leaning into this and it sounds like it is turning into quite a gravy train for them.

Ron Lieber: Exactly. Right. And if people feel like these programs and the vast majority of them were almost certainly marketed this way. If people feel like these programs are going to help them advance in their career, they're going to be enough people who are willing to borrow a bunch of money from the federal government and essentially take the risk that their earnings are going to go up after they're done.

Rachel Abrams: And do we have any sense of how much this growth in M's programs was actually benefiting students? Like were these programs actually helping to supercharge what they would earn once they graduated, for example?

Ron Lieber: Yeah. So the data back then wasn't as granular or widespread as what we have today, but there was definitely suspicion that at least some and and and maybe a growing number of those masters programs weren't really doing the job of helping people increase their, you know, financial and earnings prospects.

Ron Lieber: But even for those programs that may not have been supercharging people's earnings, the universities started to find what became kind of a workaround for them and that was the public service loan forgiveness program. So that was created in the 2000s. And in that program, if you go to work for a nonprofit or the government, what happens there is that if you do that job for 10 years, the federal government will wave the rest of your student loan balance entirely once that period is over.

Rachel Abrams: They forgive it.

Ron Lieber: It cancels that loan balance all together. And so schools, they kind of start to get wise to this. And you start to see examples of those schools really encouraging students to make use of that public service loan forgiveness program. And that encourages people to sort of compartmentalize how much they're taking out, right? What the dollar amount will actually end up being at the end because the debt just gets cancelled in 10 years, right?

Rachel Abrams: Mhm. But it's worth noting here that it does not always go well for those students.

Ron Lieber: Sometimes they figure out years down the road that they actually didn't understand how the program worked or they were doing it wrong because they got bad advice. Maybe their job did not qualify or they didn't do the certification process correctly. There's a lot of paperwork here. Or maybe they go into some kind of public service job and they hate it and they're either stuck staying there in some kind of job that qualifies for 10 years in order to cancel the debt or they don't do that. They go take a different job that doesn't qualify and then they're stuck paying back a whole bunch of money. And while borrowers are not blameless, we have a systemic problem here with helping people understand the complexity that exists in America around money. So it's not really leading to great outcomes.

Rachel Abrams: I wonder if you could give us an example or two of an individual person that stands out to you who has run into some kind of trouble like what we are talking about.

Ron Lieber: So, the person I've written about more than anyone else in the pages of the New York Times is a guy named Jed Schaefer, who we refer to internally as sort of the patron saint of lost student loan causes. God,

Rachel Abrams: this is—

Ron Lieber: —this is a guy who works with high school dropouts, some of them homeless, and sets them up in a program where they learn life skills and get their GED. So, the exact type of job that might qualify for one of these public service loan forgiveness programs,

Rachel Abrams: right?

Ron Lieber: So, Jed got a master's degree so that he could do this work. He borrowed a bunch of money and he thought he was doing the repayment correctly in order to get to the point where the loans would be wiped away through one of these federal programs. And it turns out it was a whole mess. Now, eventually he got it sorted out, but if he had not, he would still be making large payments each month. I I think to this day, and he'd be making those large payments at the same time that he was getting ready to send his own kids to college. I don't think that's what anybody had in mind 30 or 40 years ago when we set all of these loan programs up in the first place. And so between the growth in mast's programs and the schools basically encouraging teenagers, young people to throw caution to the wind, take out these enormous loans, the problem has only gotten worse since the Obama administration tried to tackle it. Right? And that brings us to this moment that we are currently in where the Trump administration is trying something new with these caps on loans and the earnings tests for these different programs.

Rachel Abrams: That's right, Ron. You talk to university administrators all the time for your reporting about the cost of college, tuition specifically, etc., etc. And I am curious what you were hearing from them in this moment because I would imagine that they are not happy about some of these new changes coming from the administration.

Ron Lieber: Nobody wants constraints on the market and the pool of available tuition dollars. And in fact, some of the professional schools in particular have pushed back and made equity arguments, right? They're saying that people with low incomes who are confronted with loan caps and are sort of foisted into other marketplaces for, you know, private student loans from a bank or Sally May or whatever. Maybe they won't qualify depending on their program or depending on their credit or depending on their age. And we may lose a whole bunch of people who we would have actually really liked to be clinical psychologists or doctors or lawyers. And that's one of the risks here.

Rachel Abrams: But what did they say about the question about how much responsibility they bear for their alumni who might not be doctors or might not be clinical psychologists for people that maybe don't have the obvious earning potential of those types of professional degrees. What do they say they view as their responsibility to be tethered to a student's earning potential and frankly the outside world?

Ron Lieber: They try to say as little as possible and when backed into a corner they say look we don't force people to take on debt. The federal student loan program is available for a reason. this is a matter of public policy and we are making this education available to them at the price that we think is appropriate.

Rachel Abrams: I do want to ask Ron because you said earlier that the goal of all of these new efforts is to try to rein in the cost of college, right? And also to make sure that college actually provides a return on this enormous investment that some people are making. Given the history that you've laid out here and also given how long-standing and complicated and intractable some of these problems have been, do you think there's any chance that these new policies being implemented by the administration could fix those problems?

Ron Lieber: It depends on how things play out because there are many things that might happen here, right? Schools could just cut tuition right away. They could offer more in the way of financial aid. So, you know, grants or scholarships that are really just coupons and, you know, that brings the net cost down to the student, but it doesn't lower the list price necessarily. Some schools might rely on the private student loan market. They might even get into bed with one of these lenders and say, "Hey, we'll guarantee the loans on the back end because we think our students are amazing credit risks." More people might just go to cheaper schools, right? And then there is the unintended consequence potentially, right, which is that a not small number of people just give up, throw up their hands, and they say, "I'm not going to go at all."

Rachel Abrams: I do wonder if there's another way of looking at this though, which is as a long overdue course correction, like shuttering programs or schools or departments or whatever that might only exist because there was money there to fuel them and not necessarily because they serve the students or civic society. It could also maybe redirect some students who might be better served by not going to school. So I just kind of wonder like how you are weighing all of this and how you are thinking about sort of the net benefits and the net consequences.

Ron Lieber: I am rooting for people to become way more informed about the data that exists now around what you'll earn if you get a particular major or what you'll earn if you go to particular graduate degree program. I'm not saying that we need to put all the PhD programs in history out of business or that, you know, private universities should stop offering, you know, expensive master's degrees in social work. But what I am saying is that everybody who's shopping for higher education deserves way better answers and way more data when they come to the institutions with questions about why this costs more than that competing institution down the street by 20 or $30,000 a year or why this master's degree that did not exist 5 years ago actually offers me something that will make me smarter, that will build my network, and that will advance my career. When there's a change in public policy that alters the marketplace, it's an opportunity for consumers to pause and say, "Huh, there's a change that's happened here. It's supposed to be for my benefit. What questions am I not asking that could make me more informed?" You are rooting for more transparency and for people to be having more honest conversations about what the value of going to school is.

Rachel Abrams: Yes, please talk more, ask better questions. We are entitled to better answers to these questions from the institutions.

Ron Lieber: Ron Lieber, thank you so much.

Rachel Abrams: Thank you.

Ron Lieber: We'll be right back.

Rachel Abrams: Here's what else you need to know today.

News anchor: In separate decisions on Tuesday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Trump administration's attempt to end birthright citizenship and handed Republicans a victory in their fight against federal campaign spending limits.

News anchor: In the latter case, the court ruled the current federal limits on coordinated spending violated the First Amendment. In descent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the ruling effectively allowed a party to act as a candidate's quote checking account.

News anchor: In the Birthright Citizenship case, the court reaffirmed the long-held principle that nearly all children who are born on US soil are American citizens. The president had issued an executive order aimed at preventing babies born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents from automatically becoming citizens. But the court ruled that the order had violated the 14th amendment.

Rachel Abrams: Today's episode was produced by Olivia Nat, Adrienne Hurst, Diana Wyn, and Ricky Netski. It was edited by Rob Zipco, and Lisa Chow, and contains music by Marian Lozano and Diane Wong. Our theme music is by Wonderly. And this episode was engineered by Chris Wood.

Rachel Abrams: That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.