The earnings test is the right idea. The current design would shut down most of the programs training America’s pastors, teachers, and social workers.
LAKELAND, Fla. – Last October, I argued that tying federal college aid to graduate earnings was a long-overdue win for American families. I believed it then, and I believe it now. A degree financed with taxpayer dollars should leave graduates better off than they would have been without it. That is accountability.
But accountability only works when the measurement reflects reality.
On May 7, Christianity Today reported that under the Department of Education’s proposed earnings rule, 89% of religion master’s programs and 53% of religion bachelor’s programs would fail the federal benchmark. If finalized as written, the rule would effectively strip federal aid from many of the programs that train America’s pastors, missionaries, counselors, Christian-school teachers, and nonprofit leaders.
The problem is not the principle. The problem is the formula.
Under the proposed rule, a graduate’s first-year earnings are compared to those of a 34-year-old high school graduate. A 22-year-old seminary graduate entering ministry is being measured against someone with more than a decade of workforce experience and accumulated wage growth.
No serious accountability system should compare a graduate just entering the workforce to someone sixteen years into a career.
And seminaries would only be the beginning.
The social worker serving homeless veterans would fail the metric. The teacher who leaves the private sector for a Title I classroom could fail it too. The addiction counselor helping rebuild lives in a church-based recovery ministry may fail as well. The rule does not separate low pay from low value. It rewards higher salaries while penalizing service-oriented callings.
In practice, the government would not be measuring whether a degree created value. It would be measuring whether graduates chose a calling instead of a contract.
That is a dangerous mistake at a moment when America already faces shortages of teachers, counselors, pastors, foster-care workers, and community leaders. Across the country, schools struggle to fill classrooms, churches struggle to find pastors, and nonprofits struggle to recruit counselors and social workers. Yet Washington is on the verge of declaring that many of the programs producing those workers simply do not earn enough to matter.
America cannot say it values service while penalizing the people willing to choose it.
And the irony is hard to miss. Policymakers routinely speak about rebuilding civil society, strengthening families, and restoring trust in local institutions. But those institutions do not sustain themselves. They depend on teachers, pastors, counselors, chaplains, and nonprofit leaders formed in exactly these kinds of programs.
You cannot rebuild the institutions that hold communities together while defunding the schools that prepare the people who serve in them.
Fortunately, this problem is fixable.
First, extend the earnings window. A graduate’s long-term value cannot be measured after a single year in the workforce. Measure earnings at year five or year ten instead, and the picture changes substantially.
Second, broaden the outcomes. Loan repayment rates, licensure pass rates, job placement, and employer satisfaction provide a far more complete picture of whether a program is delivering results.
Third, adjust for public-service fields that are intentionally lower-paying but socially indispensable. The federal government already recognizes this principle through Public Service Loan Forgiveness. This rule should recognize it too.
At Southeastern University, our graduates become ministers and missionaries, but also public-school teachers, social workers, nonprofit leaders, counselors, and hospital chaplains. Many are the first in their family to attend college. For many, federal aid is the only path into those professions.
The country is stronger when those doors remain open — when the daughter of a roofer in central Florida can become a teacher, and the son of a single mother in Atlanta can prepare for ministry without being priced out of the calling altogether.
The administration is right to pursue accountability in higher education. But accountability fails when it confuses salary with worth and service with failure.
There is still time to get this right.
Defend accountability. Fix the formula. Because a country that penalizes service should not be surprised when fewer people answer the call.
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