The Department of Education is threatening to end federal aid to 42% of eligible colleges and universities for missing required deadlines to document the value of their degrees.
The federal agency has given 1,930 delinquent schools until Jan. 15 to share tuition and cost totals broken down by academic program for 2024 and 2025. The institutions face fines, sanctions and a pause in grants and loans if they fail to do so.
Federal Student Aid, the office that distributes billions of dollars in student loans to 4,640 eligible campuses, has imposed a separate Oct. 1 deadline to submit numbers for 2026.
The Trump administration requested the data as part of a new policy ending federal aid to programs whose alumni earn less than the average high school graduate.
“Colleges and universities are legally required to report the real prices of their programs and any financial aid or loans their students receive, yet nearly half of institutions nationwide haven’t submitted the required data,” said Ellen Keast, an Education Department spokeswoman.
“That failure leaves students in the dark about the debt burdens their programs create,” she added in an email.
Federal Student Aid plans to publish the numbers in a public database next year, bolstering a broader push in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to refocus higher education spending on emerging workforce needs.
Officials at the American Council on Education, the nation’s largest coordinating body of advanced learning, say schools are struggling to keep up with a “raft of changes” to funding regulations in the bill.
“Our institutions are working hard to comply with all of these new deadlines and requirements, but that doesn’t mean there is not potential confusion and also some institutional capacity issues,” said Emmanual Guillory, the council’s senior director of government relations.
“We will continue to work with our institutions and the Department of Education to help address any concerns,” he added.
Analysts say other factors in the delayed reporting include shifting federal rulemaking, a lack of administrative resources to track students, and weak institutions quietly concealing poor results.
“Certainly, there is some data mischief taking place,” said Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability, which tracks campus finances. “However, the most likely scenario is that these noncompliant colleges lack the financial resources and human talent to comply.”
Mr. Stocker, a former private college administrator, said it’s unlikely the government will keep its threat to cut off aid since “it would put too many colleges at risk of short-notice closure.”
The new database will compare education costs to federal tax and Social Security records, letting officials document which low-paying degree programs could lose access to student loans and grants.
The Education Department has pledged to cancel aid for degrees that leave borrowers without the income needed to pay off federal loan debt, which averages $29,550 per graduate.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person with only a high school diploma earned $49,556 last year.
A Research.com analysis of federal earnings data found that the average humanities bachelor’s graduate earns $26,854 in the first year, with median annual wages increasing to $45,919 over time.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania education history professor, said he was “troubled by the prospect of the government closing down schools that don’t show a salary boost for them.”
“The purpose of college is not simply to obtain a high-paying job. It’s to cultivate free-thinking minds,” he said.
Failing the test
The American Enterprise Institute, citing Education Department data, estimates that nearly 2,000 colleges have at least one program likely to fail the Trump administration’s new earnings test.
The HEA Group, a higher education consulting firm, projects that 2% of associate’s and bachelor’s degree graduates earn less than the typical high school graduate, even four years after entering the workforce.
“The colleges that have reported [to the Trump administration] are already feeding into a new era of transparency and accountability for colleges and universities,” said Michael Itzkowitz, the HEA Group president. “This benefits students and taxpayers.”
Mr. Itzkowitz is a former Education Department official who created the agency’s College Scorecard under the Obama administration in 2015 — the largest previous effort to publicize costs and outcomes.
Its website continues to publish the latest alumni debt and earnings averages, but it does not break down schools by degree.
“Every semester these data stay missing, a new class of students risks enrolling blind or, even worse, in a program with really bad outcomes,” Mr. Itzkowitz said.
Higher education has struggled for years with rising costs, declining enrollment projections and artificial intelligence eliminating white-collar jobs that long drew liberal arts graduates.
In March, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that half of all bachelor’s program graduates between 2012 and 2021 were underemployed a year later, working off their school debt in low-paying jobs that did not require their degrees. Of that group, nearly 75% remained underemployed a decade after graduation.
Meanwhile, the Hechinger Report projects that 442, or 26%, of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit campuses will close or merge over the coming decade. That would affect 670,000 students, out of 18.6 million nationwide in the recent spring semester.
The nonprofit trade publication flagged AI automation for accelerating the downsizing by reducing the perceived market value of many four-year humanities degrees at tuition-dependent campuses.
Jake Williams, co-founder of Ivy Brothers, a New York City education consulting firm that helps families apply to top-ranked schools, said many low-ranked colleges have fudged numbers to lure students into programs lacking a clear career path.
“That’s why the federal data needs to be granular,” said Mr. Williams, a Princeton University graduate who supports the new earnings test. “I want to know the school, the program, what students paid, what they earn afterward and ideally where they’re actually getting hired.”
’Rendered useless’
Analysts expect the Trump administration’s value transparency policy to hasten the demise of humanities degrees such as English, philosophy and foreign languages — all of which have experienced precipitous enrollment declines in recent years.
Thomas Jankowski, founder of LE TEEN, a digital college finance planning publication, estimated that 16% of bachelor’s degree graduates “never break even” on what they spend for college.
He added that while the average engineering graduate breaks even by age 26, the average psychology graduate waits until 41.
“Fifteen extra working years for the same four years at school, and I have yet to find an admissions page that prints it,” Mr. Jankowski said. “And the spread between the best and worst major runs $1.24 million over a lifetime.”
Conservatives have long derided higher education as a Ponzi scheme that uses federal money to indoctrinate young people in liberal race and gender identity theories, then leaves many of them in crippling debt.
“This is not simply a data-management problem,” said Madison Marino Doan, an education analyst at The Heritage Foundation. “Policymakers need accurate information to determine whether programs that involve federal student aid are producing positive outcomes for students.”
She pointed to an Inside Higher Ed estimate that 578 of the 1,930 colleges with missing or unreported data, roughly 30%, haven’t submitted a single thing to the Education Department.
A study published by the conservative Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity estimated that 29% of federal Pell Grant and student loan dollars between 2018 and 2022 were used “at programs that leave students with a negative return on investment.”
Roughly $122 billion out of $418 billion in funding for 53,000 programs during the period went to Pell Grants, undergraduate loans and graduate loans where total education costs exceeded the extra income earned from having the degree.
According to some experts, the Trump administration’s push for financial transparency may ultimately be meaningless.
Financial adviser Jay Murray, president of the college planning firm Solutions for Tuition, noted that the Education Department admitted this month that it already has the data needed for its earnings test.
He also stressed that students are already voting with their feet by avoiding majors where AI is eroding jobs, including software programming.
“A whole slew of college majors has been rendered useless, and those matching occupations, eliminated by artificial intelligence,” Mr. Murray said. “The only known fact is the earnings tests in many majors will likely fail miserably going forward, through no fault of the colleges.”
