Student loan borrowers are scrambling to make sense of changing rules that will soon affect their ability to take on more debt, as well as their options to pay back what they owe.
Depending on your view of higher education, this serves as either a petty blow to lower-income individuals trying to pay for their education or a long-overdue effort to rein in out-of-control tuition and deadbeat borrowers.
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The reality, though, is a bit more complicated. Both perspectives hold some truth. Both also overlook a couple of key points. Something about President Donald Trump’s student loan reforms does seem a little petty, coming off as a deliberate thumb to the eye of those who would have benefited from Biden’s absurd loan forgiveness program (but had absolutely no involvement in its formulation). Simultaneously, uncapped and irresponsible borrowing has allowed universities to artificially inflate the price of their product.
Often lost in these discussions, however, is that the real problem is not debt-ridden baristas trying to get out of paying for grievance studies degrees or former communications majors bilking plumbers into financing their education while they enjoy its lucrative fruits, but a larger system that tricked multiple generations into thinking a college degree is necessary for success in adult life.
At some point, a college education went from a luxury for privileged youths whose parents could pay for them to spend four years in navel-gazing philosophical debate and a stepping stone for the best and the brightest from broader swaths of the population legitimately looking to improve both their intellect and their station, to the default next step following high school.
If you grew up in the ’90s, 2000’s, or later and came from a respectable family or a good home, odds are from a relatively young age, every adult in your life of any importance bombarded you with the message that you needed to go to college if you wanted to make something of yourself (and that there was something deficient about you if you didn’t).
Additionally, many employers internalized these ideas, setting “college degree” as a minimum requirement for every basic sales, marketing, and generic office position, with the rationale generally being that either college genuinely imparted the necessary skills to be successful in such positions or it at least certified someone as a responsible adult.
Making matters worse, many employers that maintained such arbitrary job requirements when hiring still wanted applicants to hold a degree nominally relevant to the positions they were trying to fill, while higher education, unable or unwilling to acknowledge some of their degrees are economically less valuable than others, promoted the idea that all college degrees are equally worthwhile, citing fuzzy notions that the knowledge or skills attained through any degree can be applied to any job.
CLOSE ONE LOOPHOLE TO END THE FOREIGN TAKEOVER OF HIGHER EDUCATION
When the adults advising young people bought into higher-ed’s claims, we ended up with young people earning respectable enough humanities and social science degrees who thought their efforts would be rewarded but found themselves buried in debt and educated out of the job market. Granted, they were adults when they chose their majors and signed their loan agreements, but the decisions undoubtedly were influenced by large institutions profiting from the bad information they put out to portray their defective products as indispensable.
Moving forward, yes, capping student loan debt should help prevent future generations from making some of the mistakes of their predecessors, but maligning borrowers helps no one. Furthermore, though, until the actions of universities and the questionable valuation and suspect necessity of most degrees are addressed, the flawed, near-ubiquitous assumptions that yielded our current student debt crisis will remain.
Daniel Nuccio is an independent journalist and a spring 2026 College Fix fellow. He is a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute. He earned his doctorate in biology in 2025.
