As graduate students make up an increasingly larger share of the federal student loan portfolio, the U.S. Education Department is looking to gather more information about the programs receiving federal dollars and how students fare in them—a step that could lead to greater federal and public scrutiny of graduate education.
The department is adding new requirements on graduate and other programs that leave students with debt they can’t pay off as part of a new financial value transparency framework and gainful-employment rule released last week. The department and advocates say the new rule will help protect students from programs that leave them with debt they can’t afford, or that leave them worse off. Colleges and universities are concerned about unintended consequences and the costs to comply with the new framework.
The department’s transparency measures will apply to all programs in all sectors—a shift from previous accountability efforts, which largely focused on for-profit colleges.
Starting in July 2024, institutions will have to report more program-level data—including enrollment figures, total costs and private and institutional borrowing. The Education Department will use that information to calculate whether students can afford their debt payments and whether the investment would be worth their time and money. It will set performance benchmarks for those two metrics to signal to families and students which programs “may have adverse financial consequences to students,” according to the final rule.
The department will report data on all programs with more than 30 students on a new website that it expects to launch in July 2026. That website will provide more granular program-level data than the College Scorecard and will offer more information about master’s, doctoral and professional degrees, which have come under increasing scrutiny. Department officials said in a report released in August that borrowing trends and the outcomes of graduate programs were cause for concern.
Diane Cheng, vice president of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonpartisan research and policy group that supports the transparency measures, said the website will give students and families more “actionable data” to make decisions.
“College is such a big investment of students’ time and money, and so they deserve to know where their investments are likely to pay off,” Cheng said. “The information in the new financial value transparency framework would go a long way to providing students that information, which is information they have not had before.”
Read the full article at Inside Higher Ed.
