The heart of the woke machine in academia is about to be gutted through a new Trump rule that ties federal financial aid to outcomes in the real world.
NPR quietly reported that the U.S. Department of Education is rolling out a new financial accountability test that is really simple and so common sense that one wonders why it was not always the case.
Here's the new "do no harm" test for American colleges: If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who did not go to college, that program will lose its federal student loan funding for those programs and degrees. The same rule will apply to graduate programs.
"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," Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said. It's so important that all of this wash of poison sloshing around in our culture has been underwritten by foolish spending of taxpayer money.
The implications are pretty clear on the surface: Defunded by taxpayers will be degrees in transgender ideologies of indigenous West African tribal communities that land their degree holders in jobs asking if they want almond or soy milk with that. This will hit at the heart of the most literally worthless degrees coming out of the woke mills.
Those implications, coupled with normal media TDS, drove NPR to spend most of the article talking to people in the academic industrial complex who say this could slash the arts.
To be clear, no one is eliminating these programs. The Trump administration is just saying that the guys climbing in your 1,000-degree attic to fix your electric wiring, crawling under your sink to fix your drain, and breaking their backs putting on your new roof will no longer be forced to underwrite degrees in lesbian art at the turn of the century. Letting the market decide will itself end up cutting a lot of these degrees.
"Earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle," said Lee Ann Scotto Adams, executive director of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP). NPR describes this organization as a nonprofit that studies the careers of arts graduates. Well, earnings matter a lot when the taxpayer is on the hook for your loans.
But it is also an admission that there are college degrees that cost more to get than they are worth. Scotto Adams wants taxpayers to keep shelling out for those such as the music teacher NPR sympathetically highlighted who has $55,000 in student debt for her mariachi music degree from Portland State University.
This change implements an element of last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included a series of policy changes aimed at making college more affordable. (Trashing Republicans is a favorite pastime for many on the right, but that OBBBA is the gift that keeps giving.)
The Education Department says the calculations for measuring the earnings value of a degree will begin in 2027, with some programs designated as "low-earning outcome programs" beginning in 2028. They intend to move quickly.
The DOE already knows there are undergraduate programs in the theater, music, and studio arts that will fail the test and be defunded by taxpayers, and master's programs in mental and social health services that would fail. Those are also programs riddled with the woke virus.
Some arts programs in a few elite universities may be underwritten by some lefty billionaires intent on ensuring that people with the artistic ability of a five-year-old can get their four-year degree in finger painting. But they won't make a dent in the loss of federal tax money flowing into these broken-brain degrees.
Scotto Adams said the quiet part out loud: "Our creative workers want the ability to have independence in their work. They want socially conscious jobs. They want to make an impact culturally."
And there it is. That's how we know this will hit the woke virus. We all know what "socially conscious" and "make an impact culturally" mean. The less of that rot in our culture, the better. No better place to start cutting it off than at the source.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
