Pay for your own master's degree in puppetry

Credit: University of Connecticut

Pay for your own master's degree in puppetry, writes Julia R. Cartwright on RealClearEducation. Don't ask taxpayers to foot the bill.

Under the new Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS), students won't be able to get federal loans for "undergraduate programs whose graduates cannot out-earn a typical high school diploma holder and graduate programs whose alumni cannot beat a typical bachelor’s holder," writes Cartwright, a law and economics fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

"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," said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent.

Nationwide, "roughly 31 percent of students are enrolled in programs that are a losing bet financially," Cartwright notes. Their launch into adult life will be weighed down by debts they can't repay. The taxpayers will pick up the bills.

The big defaulters tend to be people who got high-priced master's degrees in low-pay fields.

Median graduate-school debt has tripled in the 20 years since Grad PLUS let graduate students take out unlimited loans, she writes. "Median borrower debt climbed to over $57,000." As a result, "many master’s programs now leave students financially worse off than if they had skipped the diploma entirely."

STATS is too lenient, Cartwright argues. The Education Department "dropped the tougher debt-to-earnings metric that would have flunked thousands of overpriced programs," so now only about 5 percent of programs will fail the test. Furthermore, trade groups are lobbying the new regulatory bureaucracy for exceptions.

Her solution is to stop writing blank checks to colleges and guaranteeing loans. "Borrowing $100,000 for electrical engineering is a fundamentally different proposition than borrowing $100,000 for sociology, and a rational lender bearing real risk would price them differently, demand justification, and almost certainly decline the latter." Few will pay their own money for "economically absurd credentials."

"This is really a very low floor," Christopher Madaio at The Institute for College Access & Success tells NPR's Cory Turner. "I mean, high school earnings is not an exceedingly high metric for a program to meet."

The most likely to lead to lower-than-high-school pay are programs at for-profit colleges, certificate programs in cosmetology and "somatic body work" and some two-year programs for day-care workers. Only 1 percent of traditional, four-year bachelor programs are likely to fail the earnings test, often in fine arts, theater and music. At the master's level, about 4 percent of programs are vulnerable, especially master's in mental health and social services.

Of course, money isn't everything, say defenders of creative arts studies. Students may have low earnings but high satisfaction. But should taxpayers pay for that puppetry studies degree?