Trump’s Student Loan Rules Finally Hold Higher Education Accountable. The Left is Furious.

The Trump administration put some reasonable limits on federal student loans, and the Left is having a fit about it.

According to a Department of Education rule finalized in July, schools will now need to prove that their degrees are paying off for students to ensure that they remain eligible for federal funds.

The rule change was finalized in July but has only now gone viral. That’s likely because schools must report loan data at the beginning of October.

In my mind, the Trump administration’s policy is a necessary course correction. It’s especially important because of the explosion of direct student loans under President Barack Obama. America is awash in bad student loans that many young Americans struggle to pay off.

The administration’s policy change does two things.

One, it allows the federal government to be a better steward of taxpayer dollars. This is a very rare “W” on that front, let’s be honest.

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Just as importantly, the new rule partially defunds both the institutions that are outright scamming students or are, even more perversely in my book, simply funding their unpopular ideological agenda through heaping helpings of public money.

Reasonable people may disagree about how much students are complicit in the explosion of student loan debt in America. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it isn’t merely because millennials and zoomers are just that much more irresponsible than their predecessors.

This system of vast student loan debt and government entanglement, and higher education’s benefit from it, was a product of conscious policy decisions.

The Trump administration clearly intends to unwind this nexus and put the government on sounder economic footing.

Some leftist politicians and the institutional Left have noticed and are predictably apoplectic.

Here’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on X braying about how this is about President Donald Trump’s “oligarchy, greed, and corruption.”

The left-wing New Republic went with an X headline that read, “Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.”

But that’s not true, as the Department of Education noted. The administration isn’t banning anything. It isn’t telling schools what programs to offer and which ones not to. It’s simply restricting taxpayer money from going to loans that are likely to end up underwater.

In a sense, they are protecting both the student and the taxpayer.

“Federal student loans are not a welfare program for failing college programs,” the department of Education wrote on X. “American students deserve education and training pathways that prepare them for the workforce—and transparency about programs that will never pay off.”

That’s right.

Funnily enough, even the Obama administration—which was generally happy to pump up the federal loan industry—considered a similar rule to keep cost and scams under control. Though it only wanted to go after “for-profit” colleges while letting their friends at big nonprofit universities off the hook, of course.

The New Republic’s contention that restricting taxpayer-backed loans “bans” students from certain majors does reveal a certain kind of toxic mentality common in big academia and among its media enablers. They think the taxpayer money faucet belongs to them by right, that the American people must fund not only student loans, but the institutions propped up by them.

It isn’t, and this Trump administration is the first White House in my lifetime that’s been willing to show them that’s not the case. Higher education is badly in need of a reckoning, across the board. For too long it has been monolithically ideological, racially discriminatory, negligent in its promises to students, and smugly detached from the American people who’ve unwittingly enabled them.

There’s your real source of “greed and corruption.”

What the Trump administration has done is to begin treating academia not as a kind of secular church, owed money just to exist, but as a public investment like any other.

If the American people are to continue subsidizing higher education, we should expect a return on that investment, and our political leaders should operate in our interest.

Now, economic growth may not be the primary purpose of our nation’s colleges and universities. A good education can and should be more than just an economic investment. But that burden of assessment belongs to the schools, not governments. There are a few very good ones that take no federal money at all and succeed tremendously, where parents and other benefactors are happy to continue their support.

Be more like Hillsdale, and your school will be just fine.

The federal government has become far too involved in this whole process. I’d argue that it’s ultimately weakened genuine education in America and made failed institutions increasingly unaccountable. It’s also caused college tuition to skyrocket.

The only way to fix that mess is to start putting restrictions on the loans and begin the process of narrowing the federal government’s interest in higher education as a whole.

The Left will hate it, the universities will squeal, but it must be done.