A new US rule to kill degree mills could also defund Juilliard

Beat a high-school grad's paycheck in year four, or lose your loans

Starting with the 2027 award year, the U.S. Department of Education will run every undergraduate and graduate program through a single test, one an agency official has nicknamed "do no harm." Four years after a cohort finishes, the government checks their median earnings against the median earnings of people in the same state who never went past high school. Miss that bar too often, and the program loses access to federal Direct Loans, the loan program that funds a large share of US undergraduates.

The rule comes out of last year's tax-and-spending package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent framed the logic for NPR in plain market terms:

"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." — Nicholas Kent, Under Secretary of Education

By the Department's own projections, about 800,000 students are currently enrolled in programs that would fail the test today. The failure rate isn't even. It hits 18% of undergraduate certificate programs (cosmetology and "somatic body work" top the list), 6% of associate degrees (early-childhood education is the riskiest track), 4% of master's programs (mental and social health services), and just 1% of four-year bachelor's programs overall. That last figure hides a sharper one: 14% of bachelor's music programs would fail, including ones at Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, and Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music.

Critics interviewed by NPR mostly don't dispute the arithmetic. They dispute the standard. Christopher Madaio of the Institute for College Access & Success called clearing the wage of a high school graduate "really a very low floor" to set, and noted the test ignores debt entirely: a program can pass while its graduates carry six-figure loans, and a debt-free graduate earning modestly can sink one. Lee Ann Scotto Adams of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project pushed the objection further:

"Earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle." — Lee Ann Scotto Adams, Strategic National Arts Alumni Project

She and SNAAP president Doug Dempster argue that arts careers take years to reach a stable income, and that cutting the loan pipeline off early doesn't just shrink degree programs. It shrinks who can afford to become an artist in the first place.

The mechanics, reproduced against a real school's numbers

None of that framing survived long once the 327-comment HN thread got hold of the regulation's fine print: it isn't judged school by school, it's judged program by program, tracked by six-digit CIP code, one earnings comparison at a time. One commenter went further and pulled up the Department's own public earnings tool to check a real school against it:

"If the high school grads earn more than the bachelors degree grads for 2 out of the past 3 years, the Feds won't offer student loans for that (Institution, CIP code) tuple." — a commenter who checked MIT's own numbers against the Department's public earnings tool

The test isn't as novel as the announcement makes it sound, either. For-profit certificate programs have lived under a nearly identical earnings comparison for over a decade, under the Obama-era "Gainful Employment" rule. What's new is extending the same math to four-year colleges and their bachelor's and master's programs — institutions that have never had to clear this particular bar before.

Cheering a rule that could defund Juilliard's pipeline

The thread split cleanly: readers glad a bar finally applies to schools that never had one, against readers who saw a blunt instrument aimed at the humanities. On the first side, the bluntest line came in reply to a comment worried that less aid means a less-educated population:

"Higher ed is a cash incinerating inferno. When there is an out of control fire you must stop throwing fuel into it." — nullc, a 16-year HN veteran with almost 19,000 karma

A founder who has built and sold multiple companies, including the e-signature startup SignNow, made a related economic case: federal loans don't just cover tuition, they let colleges keep raising it.

"Federally subsidized loans is directly (not solely) responsible for rapid inflation of college costs in the US. Anything to limit its use is a good thing." — a founder who has run three companies, including SignNow

A computer science instructor backed the same read with a number from his own career:

"…the cost of the degree, which is now 5x more (inflation adjusted) than when I went to school. None of these programs would be at risk under these new rules back in the day." — a computer science instructor at Oregon State University-Cascades

"Not everything worth doing pays": who gets filtered out first

The counter-camp wasn't defending degree mills. It was defending the idea that a degree can be worth having without a spreadsheet proving it. A programming-languages researcher, arguing from his own household, pushed back hardest against reducing college to a return on investment:

"The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job… It's to turn you into a better thinker, a better person, and someone more capable of living well." — a programming-languages researcher

A sharper worry came from a reader who worked through the incentive the rule actually creates, not the one it advertises. Comparing a college's graduates to strangers who never enrolled rewards any school that quietly stops admitting the students most likely to struggle — a reading of the rule that turns "do no harm" into a filtering test on applicants, four years before anyone sits an entrance exam.