6 minEconomy
Federal Earnings Rule Puts Design Programs in Budget Crosshairs
A new federal earnings-accountability framework could cut off Direct Loans to programs whose graduates earn less than high school graduates, and design programs classified as art may be among the most exposed.
A new federal earnings-accountability framework for higher education could put design programs at financial risk, not because of how their graduates perform in the labor market, but because of how universities classify them. Under the U.S. Department of Education plan, undergraduate programs will be judged partly on whether their graduates earn more than workers whose highest credential is a high school diploma. Most of the framework takes effect July 1, 2027, and a program that fails the earnings benchmark in two of three consecutive award years can lose access to federal Direct Loans.
The stakes are highest for programs in lower-earning fields, including parts of the arts and humanities, where the economic return of a degree is harder to demonstrate through graduate earnings alone. Federal accountability operates at the program level, sorting programs by factors including credential level and Classification of Instructional Programs code. That classification system may create a particular problem for design. Many design programs are housed in art departments and classified as art programs, even though their graduates increasingly work across technology, business, marketing and other industries. The government may see an art program because that is how the university itself has chosen to classify it.
The policy reflects a broader question higher education has long avoided: what is a degree worth? Students borrowing heavily have a legitimate interest in whether a degree is likely to improve their economic position, and the government underwriting those loans has an interest in the answer. A degree can be intellectually valuable and financially questionable at the same time. But using earnings as the primary measure of educational value raises problems that economic logic alone cannot resolve.
A philosophy degree is not worthless because an engineer earns more. Love, religion, literature, music, art and the humanities remain places where people wrestle with questions markets and empirical methods are not designed to answer. Science can explain extraordinary things about how the world works, but it cannot by itself determine what makes a life meaningful, what is beautiful, or what we owe one another. The philosopher David Hume identified the problem of moving from statements about what is to conclusions about what ought to be. Modernity has occasionally made a similar mistake, confusing the ability to measure things with the ability to determine what matters.
There is also a political dimension. The current administration has challenged parts of higher education it considers ideological, and some of those programs exist alongside or within the same academic structures as arts and humanities programs that may become collateral damage. When taxpayers fund higher education, it is not unreasonable for the elected government to question whether particular programs serve a legitimate public purpose, including whether they contribute to open inquiry, intellectual diversity or the pursuit of truth. The difficulty is that a program can become vulnerable for very different reasons: lower graduate earnings, political scrutiny of its subject matter, or simply belonging to an academic category associated with both.
An argument about financial sustainability is not an argument for discarding fields whose value economic measures cannot fully capture. If society believes certain fields are worth preserving despite producing lower-paying careers, it can support them through institutional subsidies, targeted grants, public-service loan forgiveness, lower tuition or other models that reduce dependence on individual debt. Asking students to borrow heavily for degrees associated with modest earnings, then using those earnings as evidence that the programs were not worth supporting, conflates whether a field deserves support with how its education should be financed.
Design occupies a less comfortable position in this debate because it is both an academic tradition and a professional field. Design education developed largely within art schools, drawing from typography, composition and studio practice, but its graduates now shape products, services and digital systems across the economy. That dual identity may prove awkward under a framework that reads program codes more easily than it reads career paths. A society increasingly organized around technology, economic growth and material production may have particular need for people trained to ask what any of it is for. Their contributions are considerably harder to put on an earnings statement, but difficulty measuring something is not evidence that it has no value.
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