BY HANK REICHMAN

On May 21, the Department of Education released new data about levels of student debt in various academic programs.  Writing in the New York Times, Kevin Carey, who directs the education policy program at New America, suggests that the move is part of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.  The department is already moving to repeal regulations promulgated by the Obama administration that deny access to the federal financial aid system to colleges where students don’t earn enough money to pay their loans back.  Instead, the administration assumes that alleged market efficiencies will solve the problem if only “consumers” (students and their families) have access to sufficient information to make informed decisions, an approach that Carey quite sensibly finds questionable at best.

The Obama regulations have only applied to undergraduate loans, however.  “Within the graduate school sector, the fast-growing master’s degree market is replete with debt levels that make little sense,” Carey writes.  “An accredited university can essentially create a master’s degree in anything, set whatever price it likes, start signing up students for federal loans, and market the program as ‘accredited’.”

That has produced extraordinary outrages, especially at for-profit institutions like San Francisco-based Academy of Art University, where “people with federal loans who graduated in 2016 and 2017 with a master’s degree in design and applied arts owed an average of $100,252.”

But it’s not just for-profits.  “People don’t become social workers to get rich — most earn less than $50,000 per year — yet $109,486 was the average amount borrowed for a master’s in the subject at the University of Southern California,” Carey reports.  But that’s not all, and here the graduate student debt problem merges into another outrage of academic capitalism, privatization and the outsourcing of online teaching:

In fact, most of the $275 million in debt incurred by the roughly 2,500 people who earned a master’s degree in social work at U.S.C. in 2016 and 2017 didn’t go to the university itself.  It was funneled to a publicly traded for-profit technology company called 2U, which provides marketing, recruitment, course design, clinical placement and advising services for online graduate programs, in exchange for which it receives 60 percent of all tuition revenue.

And here’s another conclusion that Carey draws from the DoE data:

Master’s degrees in fields like computer engineering, education, English, history and math seem to have fewer outlier programs and lower borrowing amounts over all.  It’s the less mainstream programs, where vague promises of a lucrative career are easier to make, that seem to encourage irrationally large debt.

To be more specific, students borrowed $153,000 on average to get a master’s of dispute resolution from Pepperdine University.  To receive a master’s in dietetics and clinical nutrition at Logan University, a chiropractic school in Missouri, students borrowed $150,000 on average.  “A Pratt Institute master’s of architecture resulted in average borrowing of $157,000, while the same degree from Ohio State produced average debt of $38,000.”

Carey’s article is worth reading.  Clearly the problem of graduate student debt is a huge one, fueled by the undeniably exploitative practices of too many institutions.  Outstanding student debt now tops $1.5 trillion and one million people default on student loans every year.  But these examples also suggest that the debt problem cannot be viewed apart from the broader privatization schemes and focus on “job preparation” increasingly characteristic of higher education today under the regime of academic capitalism.