Washington Monthly - September/October 2024 - 59

which houses the program. The Family Institute serves 7,500
clients a year in family therapy, and Northwestern University
runs a prestigious undergraduate program with generous
financial aid and scores of fully funded PhD programs.
I reached out to Anthony Chambers, the head of the
Northwestern counseling program, to ask him why the debt
for students in its master's program was so high in comparison
to the salaries the students typically earn. Three weeks
later, Sarah Frick, the chief external relations officer for the
Family Institute, emailed me a prepared statement that
touted the $1.8 million in scholarships that they give out-
an average of $6,000 for each of their 300 yearly graduates-
and noted that Illinois has " only 14 behavioral health professionals
per 10,000 residents. " The program is overwhelmingly
online and none of the alumni I spoke with live in Illinois.
F
or the time being, predatory nonprofit master's programs
seem all too safe.
The government tends mostly to focus on transparency,
hoping that open data will help students make
more prudent decisions and inspire universities to clean up
their act when they see peer institutions charging less and
delivering more.
There are some exceptions to this focus on transparency,
including the occasional penalty for misleading students,
like the $37.7 million fine President Joe Biden's Department
of Education imposed on for-profit Grand Canyon University
last year for misrepresenting an approximately $55,000
doctorate as costing only around $45,000 (Northwestern's
counseling degree costs far more). Or the $700,000 fine
levied on Temple University for misrepresenting its online
MBA. Many fines are even smaller.
Another exception is the Biden administration's new
" gainful employment " rule, which applies only to for-profit
colleges and certificate programs at nonprofit universities. To
understand how limiting this restriction is, consider that forprofit
schools educate only about 8 percent of postsecondary
students. For the schools to which it applies, the rule states
that for a program to receive federal funding and be part of
the federal student loan program, the average annual loan
payment amount (if the student were to pay it off in 10 years)
must not exceed a certain percentage of the median graduate's
income. For a master's program where graduates average a salary
of $50,000, median debt couldn't exceed $62,500, and for a
master's program where graduates average a salary of $75,000,
median debt couldn't exceed $112,400.
If Northwestern were to face this test, it would decisively
fail. But it doesn't face this test, because of its nonprofit
status, which it has attained by essentially making sure to
spend all of its profits or stash them away in its $14 billion
endowment. Many of the master's programs that adorn the
bottom of our rankings would fail this test as well, but they
don't face it for the same reason-they're nonprofit.
Accreditors also tend to stand idly by, imposing standards
on programs' faculty, curriculum, and assessment,
but never on costs. As Sylvia Fernandez, the president of
CACREP, the private accreditor in charge of counseling programs,
told me, " It's the institution's prerogative to set tuition
and fees. "
It doesn't have to be this way. There is room for bipartisan
congressional action and for increased regulatory
scrutiny, if the political will is there. And it ought to be.
The College Cost Reduction Act, introduced this year
by North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx and cosponsored
by 146 other House Republicans, caps master's degree
federal loans at $24,250 annually. The Urban Institute's Jason
Delisle himself recommended a similar cap to me of around
$60,000 in lifetime loans for a master's degree. The Century
Foundation, a progressive think tank like Urban, also recommends
a cap on federal loans for graduate borrowing. The
main downside of a cap is that it would limit the ability of
some students, especially those from lower-income backgrounds,
to access higher-priced master's programs, though
a cap would also help save those students from, in many cases,
crippling debt.
It's very possible to run a
master's degree program-
even in a popular, growing
field in which salaries aren't
high, like counseling-
without dooming most
of your graduates to
decades of financial ruin.
Another possible solution involves the gainful employment
rule. The Department of Education claims that it
doesn't have the statutory authority to expand the rule to
nonprofit degree programs, which may well be correct, especially
after recent Supreme Court decisions that sharply
limit the ability of agencies to flexibly interpret their own
statutory authority. But that only strengthens the case for
legislation that definitively gives the Education Department
the power to regulate these programs.
If not forced to, universities could choose to clean up
their act themselves. And we hope they do. It's very possible
to run a master's degree program-even in a popular, growing
field in which salaries aren't high, like counseling-without
dooming most of your graduates to decades of financial ruin.
Just ask Aurora University, or any of the other programs in
the " Best " category of our master's degree rankings.
Marc Novicoff is associate editor at the Washington Monthly.
Washington Monthly 59
Washington Monthly - September/October 2024

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