Snapshot · The Daily
Higher education researcher Robert Kelchen found that 14,000 new master's degree programs were created in the roughly two decades leading up to the mid-2020s.
Where this was said
At 18:57 · chapter starts 18:03
To understand why the system is so broken, Rachel Abrams asks Lieber to rewind the clock. In 1980, the federal government began backing student loans because a growing number of families couldn't cover the last few thousand dollars of annual tuition, room, and board. College attendance was lower, borrowing volumes were modest, and the assumption was that students were decent credit risks who didn't need strict vetting. So the government set no caps and did minimal underwriting. Flash forward to 2005–2006, and the same logic was applied to graduate students: surely people getting master's and professional degrees would earn enough to repay whatever they borrowed. That assumption, Lieber argues, was the original sin — a reasonable-seeming decision in a small system that was never revisited as the system grew into a $1.7 trillion machine.
Universities discovered that master's programs — no labs, no costly infrastructure — could be enormously profitable if students believed the degree would boost their earnings. Research by Robert Kelchen found 14,000 new master's programs were created in roughly two decades, many of dubious value.
When master's programs proliferated, schools encouraged students to rely on Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a program canceling debt after 10 years of nonprofit or government work. But many borrowers misunderstood the rules, picked the wrong jobs, or got bad advice and ended up stuck with massive payments.
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