OPINION: A case for earnings-based student loan eligibility

Editor’s Note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.  

Remember when President Donald Trump promised to tidy up the country’s finances by slashing wasteful spending, ending costly “forever wars” and spurring economic growth? 

Yeah, don’t worry. My memory of that’s kind of fuzzy too, after he turned into the tariff czar, barreled into war with Iran and pledged, if Republicans win the midterms, to mail every American adult a $5,000 check — which would cost American adults, uh… $1.3 trillion. 

But lo and behold — brushing aside a few misses, like taxing endowments to strip universities of their means to fund “woke insanity” and restricting international students’ ability to study and work here — waging a resentful culture war can, it turns out, yield a grand total of one fiscally savvy policy:   

Implementing an earnings test to determine which degree programs qualify for Federal Direct Loans and Pell Grants.  

Let’s get things straight. The Trump administration isn’t carrying out this policy because it’s sensible, but because most of the degrees affected — theater, music and art studio programs — are liberal-coded, or “woke,” in the eyes of devout Trump supporters and therefore warrant complete and utter destruction. 

Indiana University alumni, specifically of the Jacobs School of Music, opposed the policy, which stipulates that graduates of a university program must earn more than high school diploma holders for future applicants to receive federal money. 

One alumna, who earned a master’s degree in music education and music theory, told the Indiana Daily Student the requirement would restrict college-bound students from choosing “what they want to study” or “what they want to do in life.” An alumnus with a bachelor’s in music education said the rule would gear the education “system” toward the wealthy. 

But the columnist doth protest.  

While barring federal grants and loans from certain studies will push a number of would-be scholars to other fields, this certainly isn’t the bad outcome it’s made out to be.  

As a matter of public policy, the United States isn’t in sore need of more academically-trained musicians, thespians or studio artists. If it were, the demand for these professions would see their median earnings rise at least marginally above those of high school graduates — as do the earnings of nurses, data scientists and physical therapists.  

That point isn’t to insinuate that the arts are unimportant — far from it. Nor is it suggesting that a university education’s sole purpose is students’ return on investment. Rather, it contests the idea that something has gone horribly wrong if arts programs shrink or even disappear from some universities.  

If Columbus State University’s music program, whose alumni boast median earnings of $18,218, vanishes, Sonoma State University’s program, where graduates can expect $65,533, will survive. Yes, collectively, fewer people will be studying the fine arts, but the smallness of this field, as a professional venture, is in its nature. Any era permits only so many da Vincis, and Leonardo da Vinci himself took on fewer than a dozen notable apprentices in his lifetime. 

That sufficed for the Renaissance, and it will for our time. 

From the individual standpoint, on the other hand, some degree of restriction comes with the territory of being a human on this side of death. 

Had this columnist, for instance, reached adolescence with the ardent desire to be a travelling cigarette salesman, no matter how much he insisted on entering this business, he is, alas, a victim of circumstance. It’s an irrefutable fact that not every option is a live one to all people. In this case, cigarette consumption has dwindled since 1980, and no major manufacturer is interested in investing in a team of itinerant salespeople to grasp at what remains of their market. 

If he felt especially confident in his chances at wild success in the cigarette sales industry, this columnist might bet on himself by studying under the Marlboro Man. But he certainly couldn’t expect taxpayers to allocate their hard-earned dollars to paying Marlboro University rather than, say, the state university so that he could instead become a nurse practitioner.  

Education is known to reduce poverty. If that’s truly the reason we want to offer prospective students taxpayer-funded grants and below-market rate loans — not to make ourselves feel good as a society or pursue some utopic notion of unconditional career choice — the education that’s being subsidized should be in fields that actually have a fair shot at improving these students’ economic status.  

Otherwise, what we want is best called charity, not policy.  

Charity is, of course, admirable. When graduates have more money from studying in-demand degrees, if music turns out to be suffering as a discipline, they’ll have the means to create those charities.  

Eric Cannon is a junior studying philosophy. Though, in another life, he might have been a traveling cigarette salesman. His column normally appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Never miss it and his other musings on X.