Can't win the Argument? Eliminate the Evidence

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

A few weeks ago the US Department of Education proposed judging eligibility for college student loan programs by what college graduates of those programs typically earn. Whole departments would be cut off from student loans under this rule. The arts programs that would fail under this test read like a list of the country’s crown jewels. Juilliard’s music degrees. Yale’s MFA. Harvard’s museum studies. Programs whose graduates, by the nature of the field they’re in, don’t clear the earnings bar that would keep their students eligible for federal loans.

This idea could wipe out entire fields of study, particularly in the arts. Yale and Juilliard and Harvard can afford to subsidize tuition at whatever level. But for hundreds of other programs at colleges and universities around the country, the squeeze on applications could be terminal at a time the demographic cliff is already impacting enrollment.

This is what happens when you insist on using a scale that doesn’t measure the thing a system is built to measure. For example, in the early 1990s New York and Pennsylvania started publishing cardiac surgeons’ mortality rates, a scorecard of patient deaths per operation. But mortality rate isn’t lives saved, it’s a ratio, and the fastest way to improve a ratio is to refuse the hardest cases. Surgeons began turning away the sickest patients and the metric improved while the thing it was supposed to prevent — cardiac deaths — got worse.

As repellant an idea as this new student loan edict seems at first look, the Trump metric isn’t crazy. Loading up a 22-year-old with $100,000 or more of debt for a degree that maybe earns $30,000 a year is a prescription for a life sentence of debt.

https://www.postalley.org/2026/07/07/cant-win-the-argument-eliminate-the-evidence/