The National Movement to Trim Higher Ed Bloat

Americans don't agree on much these days, but we all seem to agree that higher education in our country is broken. The good news is that we may now see the beginning of a nationwide movement to make higher education a better investment for students and help prepare them for life after school.

Since the 1990s, we have seen an explosion in the cost of college driven by a growth in administrators and virtually endless government-backed debt. Continued increases in enrollments allowed even state schools to create classes and even entire majors for which there was absolutely no job market.

The result is all around us. Millennials and Gen Z are buried in $1.78 trillion in student debt (larger than the economy of Australia or South Korea), and nearly half of college graduates regret their choice of major. There are more college administrators than ever—in fact, at public institutions, there are more administrators than faculty. At Yale, there is roughly one administrator per undergraduate student. It is no wonder that more and more Americans are questioning the old conventional wisdom that college is necessary. Popular respect for college is at an all-time low, and total enrollment at American colleges and universities is down by more than one million students since the Great Recession. President Trump even expressed worry about American colleges going out of business in a recent interview.

Meanwhile, there have been more than seven million jobs available in this country for more than four years straight. The CEO of Ford Motors said recently that he has more than 5,000 job openings that pay six figures—for mechanics. As Marco Rubio famously put it, we need fewer philosophers and more plumbers. There is clearly an enormous misalignment between what colleges are doing and what the job market actually needs.

Thankfully, President Trump and his administration are taking historic action to fix this situation. This summer, the president signed a new law that imposed modest limits to new student loans. President Trump’s new law will also cut off federal student loans to any major that makes students worse off than if they’d never gone to college. This might sound like an incredibly low bar, but it is a very real problem: According to one estimate, 31 percent of college degrees have a negative return on investment for students. It is an indictment on the nation’s higher education system that this kind of test should even be necessary. Sadly, it is—but President Trump’s law is the first step to fixing the problem. Thanks to President Trump, students who are being exploited and even bankrupted by colleges are now being given some protection.

Most higher education spending in America is done at state schools, which are generously subsidized by state taxpayers with the goal of strengthening the state’s economy for the next generation. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, at least 30 states already have a performance-based funding component in their higher education funding formula, using measures like graduation rates, student retention, and enrollment in high-value degree programs.

Earlier this year, we saw perhaps the next phase in this reform movement at the state level. During this year’s General Session, Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature passed House Bill 265,  the Higher Education Strategic Reinvestment Act. This reform withheld 10 percent of each Utah public college’s instructional budget, or about $60 million in total. To earn the money back, colleges had to submit three-year budget reallocation plans to the state board of higher education. 

The result? Hundreds of programs, courses, and staff offering little value to students are being cut. Some examples of cut programs include a Ph.D. in theater at the University of Utah, many underenrolled specialized language programs at Weber State University, and liberal arts minors in ethnic and gender studies. The resources freed up by these cuts will be reinvested in badly needed areas like engineering, biotechnology, and health care. Just because a subject is worthy of academic pursuit doesn’t mean that every university should offer it or that taxpayers should subsidize it. 

This new law may be the start of a nationwide movement. States like Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, and others are actively implementing or refining performance-based funding frameworks for higher education. Ohio adopted a law this year to cut degree programs with fewer than five graduates over any three-year period—and Ohio’s state schools are already cutting away. Also in 2025, Pennsylvania’s recently adopted Performance-Based Funding Council published final recommendations for a new funding approach for the state’s flagship public universities. 

Today’s students can hope that these state reforms, together with President Trump’s new law, are a sign of things to come. It is long past time that our schools stop getting a failing grade.