FEDERAL LOAN SHAKEUP: Trump TARGETS student loans, holds colleges accountable

The Trump administration is changing the rules for federal student loans, putting new earnings requirements on college programs. Under the new rule, graduates of undergrad programs must earn more than workers with only a high school diploma. Graduates of graduate programs must out-earn workers with a bachelor's degree. The education department says the goal is to hold colleges accountable and make sure federal loans are going toward education that prepares students for the workforce. Linda McMahon says it is time to focus elsewhere. Certainly, we have a need for a skilled workforce. For every five that are retiring or leaving the skilled workforce, only two are coming in. And by 2030, that will mean we'll be behind about two million workers. And if we don't clear that up, it could impact the economy by as much as a trillion dollars. That's the kind of condition of government money I like. The best thing is to pull government money out. But yeah, I don't want to lend money to people who are downwardly mobile. What did you get your undergrad in? My undergrad? I got in finance. You know that. I'm a finance whiz. See, that's why you're touting this, because I got mine in literature and communications, English. I was an English major. I will say this. This is where it gets interesting for me. If you were telling me we're going to have this debate like 15 years ago, I'd be like, baloney. There are real benefits to a liberal arts degree. People that are smart, literate, can read, write. Listen, I hire a lot of young kids for being my producer. And they all, because I wouldn't hire them if they weren't, they all are literate, and that's key to everything. Yeah, you pay them, right? They don't work for free. You pay them, but they're literate, and they can get through stuff, and they can understand statistics, and they can learn about markets, because they're literate and they're smart. The problem with that is that that sort of training, that liberal arts training, where you were taught to read stuff and understand complex things- It got totally combobulated. It got discombobulated, and it got screwed up by woke. And so I think this is a legitimate thing to do. I like the idea of standards and accountability. You don't just loan money to people who will not get what they need, the tools that they need to be able to pay it back. And I don't dispute Linda McMahon on the fact that we're going to have a shortage of skilled labor either. The fix is where I differ. You can't guarantee what wages will be. Things happen. There are conditions in the economy and the environment. I agree with you that the issue is, and I'm speaking about Cornell specifically because I've been very focused on that school. It's been in news a lot lately for many reasons. I went there, but also the wokeness, the speakers that they're having come speak to the Democrat Socialists of America group there. All of this. AOC was up there recently as well. And I'm just saying to myself, those kids are not getting the same education that I got, which was arts and sciences. It was history, reading. I learned the business and the economics later in the field in real time because I had the skills to be able to do that. So I don't know how you hold the schools accountable in that way. I like the idea in principle, but I don't think wages are the way to do it. I want to see these schools get their federal funding pulled because of anti-Semitism on campus. Well, I agree with that debate a while ago. How about if you're anti-Semitic, you don't get money. And if your kids would go to Hassan Piker lectures, can't get a job, you don't get money. Either way, you shouldn't get the money. I've spoken with people about this in the academia. The Wall Street guys that are dealing with the academic wokeness, the people like Bill Ackman, I haven't spoken to him particularly, but people like that. They say it's hard to change it from within. It's hard to just come in and say, fire every lefty professor, which is like 90% of the professors, and bring in some people that are classically liberal. So how do you starve the beast? There's only a few ways to starve the beast. And one sort of way to do it is not guaranteed. Let me just throw out a wrench in there. And I'll make this about myself. I'll make this about Dagan. And three years after finishing a program, a typical graduate should earn more than the typical worker who never went past high school. I don't think then my journalism degree would qualify for that. So that's fine. I guess I could pay my own way, but I wouldn't be able to get federal loans. Dagan, I don't know much about art history, but I don't know if that would qualify you either. So I do worry about, would a pastor make it? How would this totally upend traditional degrees that I think we value as a society? Less and less though. The wage thing doesn't solve the problem. Right. You know why it doesn't? Because my wages would have dramatically skewed that stat because I was working as a financial journalist here in New York City and making more than anybody working as a 23-year-old art history graduate, number one, and making more than most journalists would have been making in any other journalism job across the country. And I didn't go to school in New York City. I went to school in North Carolina. And so I, to Jackie's point, I don't know how you use this metric. One of the arguments that critics used against this cap was say mental health. If you get like the quote failure rate for people who get master's in mental health services, shouldn't we be encouraging people to get degrees in mental health given the mental health crisis we have in the United States? But doesn't government got to be the ones encouraging that? Why do we want to save majors that can't produce people who do? I just don't get why. They can do it on their own, but why do taxpayers? Well, the easiest way to do it, and I understand there is no underwriting standard for federal student loans, but why don't we just dramatically lower the lifetime cap on how much you can borrow from the federal government? So I think that the Fed, based on the one big beautiful bill they made changes, the total lifetime cap excluding parent plus loans is $257,500. That's a lot. That's the total lifetime cap. Why is it that much? I went to Mizzou, so I went to a state school, which I was able to work my way through and didn't have to take loans. And I got out as a business reporter, so I made a few bucks. You could theoretically have a separate category for business reporters, you know what I'm saying? I will say this though, if you look at what I paid at Mizzou, which at the time was a top three journalism school, it was so cheap compared to what it is now. And the sort of inflation of the cost of these degrees runs side by side, I can't remember the exact word, concomitant, is that the right word? Parallel. Parallel, with the explosion of student loans. So I was going to talk about tuition. It literally is feeding. I was going to talk about tuition and say, the loans are feeding the tuition problem, why can't we do something about the tuition problem or give them standards on how much they can charge? Or you don't even have to pull federal funding, why don't we just tell them that their endowment earnings aren't tax-free and figure out other ways to supplement. If they need that much for tuition, then they can supplement it in other ways rather than having the kids borrow it. Right. I hear you. It's a good debate. It's one that we'll keep doing.