Washington Monthly - September/October 2024 - 57

ate with an average of $27,588 in debt, around six times less
than the median debt of students in Northwestern's program,
$153,657. Five years later, they earn an average annual
salary of $76,132, roughly $20,000 more than the $56,897
Northwestern grads bring in.
" We are an exceptionally frugal place, " Brenda Barnwell,
the dean of Aurora's College of Education and Social
Work, told me. " We're not, you know, popping up new buildings
like crazy. " For her, online classes have gone a long way
toward solving a parking shortage on campus-not a long
way toward unlocking more money from students' wallets.
" We're a Hispanic-serving institution, and the vast majority
of our students are first generation, " she explained. " Working
on keeping those tuition dollars at a minimum has made
a big difference for [them]. "
Aurora's program is not well known, despite its stellar
debt and income statistics. U.S. News & World Report ranks social
work programs but not counseling programs, and their social
work ranking (like most of their master's degree rankings)
just shows the results of an insider survey meant to measure
prestige, factoring in neither how much the program costs nor
how much graduates tend to earn down the line.
To fill that gap, the Washington Monthly created a new set
of rankings (see " America's Best and Worst Colleges for Master's
Degrees, " page 51). Using recently released data from the
federal government's College Scorecard, we assess master's
degree programs in the 10 most popular fields-business, educational
administration, nursing, teacher education, social
work, and so on-based on how much debt students graduate
with, and how much they can expect to earn five years later.
While Northwestern's program, with around 300 graduates
per year, is among the worst offenders in the entire
master's program marketplace, it is by no means the only
predatory program. There are 631 master's degree programs
where the median debt at graduation exceeds the median income
five years after graduation, making up 11 percent of all
master's programs for which there is federal data. Each year,
more such programs spring up, as a new school picks up on
the game and existing programs raise tuition. According to
a report from the Century Foundation, AEI, and EducationCounsel,
outstanding federal loans to graduate schools have
gone from $37 billion to $90 billion in just the last seven
years, and median graduate loan balances have gone from
$21,800 to $57,800 in just the last 10 years. Meanwhile, the
earnings premium afforded to those with master's degrees
hasn't budged in decades, according to a study by Kristin
Blagg at the Urban Institute.
J
ason Delisle, another Urban Institute researcher, has
been studying the rising cost and increasing ubiquity
of master's degree programs for years. As Delisle told
me, colleges' motives in opening new programs aren't hard
to parse: " They've been opening master's degrees because
they make money. " Students can borrow their full cost of attendance
from the federal government, which includes room
and board, and the government will pay for the program up
front, which means universities have no incentive to keep
costs down or make sure that students can pay off their debt.
First enacted as part of the Deficit Reduction Act of
2005-passed by Republican majorities in Congress and
signed by President George W. Bush-uncapped graduate
school loans were thought to save the government money
because they'd have higher interest rates and be easily repayable
by most students. Income-driven repayment plans
followed shortly after for the few students expected to have
trouble paying them back. These plans were then scaled up in
2010 and again earlier this year in response to the debt crisis
these loans had helped create.
After between 10 and 25 years (depending on the
amount of debt and whether a graduate is in a public service
job) of monthly repayments on an income-driven repayment
plan, the remaining balance is forgiven. For the next two decades,
Joe Vegas and many others in his Northwestern coOne
student told me her
recruitment agent was
relentless, calling her almost
daily and remembering
every detail he heard. " He
name-dropped some of my
professors, " she said. " He
remembered my pets' names. "
hort will likely owe the federal government six-figure debt,
fail to pay it off, and, eventually, see the balance forgiven at
the taxpayer's expense.
At the 7 percent of programs that Delisle classifies as
having " very high " debt to earnings, graduates can expect to
see about $75,000 of debt forgiven, on average, after 20 years
of paying toward their loan balance but never getting close
to paying it all off.
For schools looking at the many prospective students
willing to use uncapped federal loans to get their dream job,
Delisle said, the only limit to the number of grad programs
they open and the tuition they charge is how much they
think they can get away with. And at schools with prestige
and name recognition, that number seems to only get higher.
Private nonprofit colleges are usually the most cynical offenders,
dominating our rankings of programs that have the
highest debt relative to earnings.
The students who graduate from such programs are financially
trapped. If they get on an income-driven repayment
plan, then they are spared from poverty, but if they
Washington Monthly 57
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