Examining the Debt and Earnings of “Professional” Programs (Robert Kelchen)

 [Editor's note: This article first appeared in the Robert Kelchen Blog.] 

Robert Kelchen Read on blog or Reader Examining the Debt and Earnings of “Professional” Programs By Robert on November 10, 2025 Negotiated rulemaking, in which the federal government convenes representatives of affected parties before implementing major policy changes, is one of the wonkier topics in higher education. (I cannot recommend enough Rebecca Natow’s book on the topic.) Negotiated rulemaking has been in the news quite a bit lately as the Department of Education works to implement changes to federal student loan borrowing limits passed in this summer’s budget reconciliation law. Since 2006, students attending graduate and professional programs have been able to borrow up to the cost of attendance. But the reconciliation law limited graduate programs to $100,000 and professional programs to $200,000, setting off negotiations on which programs counted as “professional” (and thus received higher loan limits). The Department of Education started with ten programs and the list eventually went to eleven with the addition of clinical psychology. In this short post, I take a look at the debt and earnings of these programs that meet ED’s definition of “professional,” along with a few other programs that could be considered professional but were not. Data and Methods I used program-level College Scorecard data, focusing on debt data from 2019 and five-year earnings data from 2020. (These are the most recent data points available, as the Scorecard has not been meaningfully updated during the second Trump administration. Five-year earnings get students in health fields beyond medical residencies. I pulled all doctoral/first professional fields from the data by four-digit Classification of Instructional Programs codes, as well as master’s degrees in theology to meet the listed criteria. Nine of the eleven programs had enough graduates with debt and earnings to report data; osteopathic medicine and podiatry did not. There were five other fields of study with at least 14 programs reporting data: education, educational administration, rehabilitation, nursing, and business administration. All of these clearly prepare people for employment in a profession, but are not currently recognized as “professional.” Key takeaways Below is a summary table of debt and earnings for professional programs, including the number of programs above the $100,000 (graduate) and $200,000 (professional) thresholds. Dentistry, pharmacy, and medicine have a sizable share of programs above the $100,000 threshold, while law (the largest field) has only four of 195 programs over $200,000. Theology is the only one of the nine “professional” programs with sufficient data that has higher five-year earnings than debt, suggesting that students in other programs may have a hard time accessing the private market to fill the gap between $200,000 and the full cost of attendance. On the other hand, four of the five programs not included as “professional” have higher earnings than debt, with nursing and educational administration being the only programs with sufficient data that had debt levels below 60% of earnings. More than one-third of rehabilitation programs had debt over the new $100,000 cap, while few programs in other fields had that high of a debt level. (Education looks pretty good now, doesn’t it?) I expect the debate over what counts as “professional” to end up in courts and to possibly make its way into a future budget reconciliation bill (about the only way Congress passes legislation at this point). Until then, I will be hoping for newer and more granular data about affected programs.

Divestment from Predatory Education Stocks: A Moral Imperative

Calls for divestment from exploitative industries have long been part of movements for social and economic justice—whether opposing apartheid, fossil fuels, or private prisons. Today, another sector demands moral scrutiny: the network of for-profit education corporations and student loan servicers that have turned higher learning into a site of mass indebtedness and despair. From predatory colleges to the companies that profit from collecting on student debt, the system functions as a pipeline of extraction. For those who believe education should serve the public good, the issue is not merely financial—it is moral.

The Human Cost of Predatory Education

For decades, for-profit college chains such as Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, the University of Phoenix, DeVry, and Capella targeted low-income students, veterans, single parents, and people of color with high-pressure marketing and promises of career advancement. These institutions, funded primarily through federal student aid, often charged premium tuition for substandard programs that left graduates worse off than when they began.

When Corinthian and ITT Tech collapsed, they left hundreds of thousands of students with worthless credits and mountains of debt. But the collapse did not end the exploitation—it simply shifted it. The business model has re-emerged in online form through education technology and “online program management” (OPM) firms such as 2U, Coursera, and Academic Partnerships. These firms, in partnership with elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and USC, replicate the same dynamics of inflated costs, opaque contracts, and limited accountability.

The Servicing of Debt as a Business Model

Beyond the schools themselves, student loan servicers and collectors—Maximus, Sallie Mae, and Navient among them—have built immense profits from managing and pursuing student debt. Sallie Mae, once a government-sponsored enterprise, was privatized in the 2000s and evolved into a powerful lender and loan securitizer. Navient, its spinoff, became notorious for deceptive practices and aggressive collections that trapped borrowers in cycles of delinquency.

Maximus, a major federal contractor, now services defaulted student loans on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education. These companies profit directly from the misery of borrowers—many of whom are victims of predatory schools or structural inequality. Their incentive is not to liberate students from debt, but to sustain and expand it.

The Role of Institutional Investors

The complicity of institutional investors cannot be ignored. Pension funds, endowments, and major asset managers have consistently financed both for-profit colleges and loan servicers, even after repeated scandals and lawsuits. Public sector pension funds—ironically funded by educators—have held stock in Navient, Maximus, and large for-profit college operators. Endowments that pride themselves on ethical or ESG investing have too often overlooked education profiteering.

Investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively hold billions of dollars in these companies, stabilizing an industry that thrives on the financial vulnerability of students. To profit from predatory education is to participate, however indirectly, in the commodification of aspiration.

Divestment as a Moral and Educational Act

Divesting from predatory education companies and loan servicers is not just an act of conscience—it is an educational statement in itself. It affirms that learning should be a vehicle for liberation, not a mechanism of debt servitude. When universities, pension boards, and faith-based investors divest from corporations like Maximus, Navient, and 2U, they are reclaiming education’s moral purpose.

The divestment movement offers a broader civic lesson: that profit and progress are not synonymous, and that investment must align with justice. Faith communities, student debt activists, and labor unions have made similar stands before—against apartheid, tobacco, and fossil fuels. The same principle applies here. An enterprise that depends on deception, coercion, and financial harm has no place in a socially responsible portfolio.

A Call to Action

Transparency is essential. Pension boards, university endowments, and foundations must disclose their holdings in for-profit education and student loan servicing companies. Independent investigations should assess the human consequences of these investments, particularly their disproportionate impact on women, veterans, and people of color.

The next step is moral divestment. Educational institutions, public pension systems, and religious organizations should commit to withdrawing investments from predatory education stocks and debt servicers. Funds should be redirected to debt relief, community college programs, and initiatives that restore trust in education as a public good.

The corporate education complex—spanning recruitment, instruction, lending, and collection—has monetized both hope and hardship. The time has come to sever public and institutional complicity in this cycle. Education should empower, not impoverish. Divestment is not merely symbolic—it is a declaration of values, a demand for accountability, and a reaffirmation of education’s original promise: to serve humanity rather than exploit it.

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Sources:

• U.S. Department of Education, Borrower Defense to Repayment Reports

• Senate HELP Committee, For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success (2012)

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) enforcement actions against Navient and Sallie Mae

• The Century Foundation, Online Program Managers and the Public Interest

• Student Borrower Protection Center, Profiting from Pain: The Financialization of the Student Debt Crisis

• Higher Education Inquirer archives

THURSDAY: "The New Mayor of New York City" on Zoom (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies)

 

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Thu. November 13: Zoom only

The New Mayor of New York City: A Post-Election Debrief A City Works Media Roundtable moderated by Laura Flanders   Thursday, November 13 1:00pm - 2:30pm Virtual-only via Zoom. Free and open to all.   Click here to register. Please register to access virtual event info and reminders.  (slucuny.swoogo.com/13November2025/register)   Guest Speakers: Claudia Irizarry Aponte - Labor and Work Reporter, THE CITY; Faculty, CUNY Newmark School of Journalism Liza Featherstone - Columnist, Jacobin and The New Republic; Contributing Writer, The Nation Amir Khafagy - Senior Labor Reporter, Documented Maya King - Politics Reporter, The New York Times Moderator: Laura Flanders - Host, Laura Flanders & Friends; Host, City Works Maya King Amir Khafagy Claudia Irizarry Aponte Liza Featherstone Laura Flanders

Tune in for a live City Works post-election roundtable that the Murphy Institute at CUNY SLU is organizing to discuss initial analysis and reactions to the election for the next mayor of New York City. The roundtable will be moderated by award-winning journalist Laura Flanders. Panelists will compare actual election results to their pre-election reporting on the mayoral race, pre-election polls and voter analysis, and general media coverage of the candidates. Speakers will provide our audience with insights on the actual voting results, including demographic/geographic trends that emerged in the electorate, and the impact that labor and social movements had on the election. Following the roundtable discussion, we will select questions from the live virtual audience to present to the panel for their comments.

Tue. December 9: in-person & Zoom event

The 2005 NYC Transit Workers Strike:  Reflections on the 20th Anniversary A conversation with Roger Toussaint, former president of TWU Local 100   Tuesday, December 9 6:30pm – 8:30pm (New York / E.T.)   In-person at CUNY SLU (map) & Virtual via Zoom livestream Free and open to all.   Click here to register. Please register to access in-person and virtual event info and reminders.  (slucuny.swoogo.com/9December2025)   Guest Speaker: Roger Toussaint - Former President, Transport Workers Union Local 100   Featuring: Joshua B. Freeman - Author, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (2000) and Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia (2025) Kafui Attoh - Associate Professor, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies; Author, Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay (2019)     Roger Toussaint  Joshua Freeman  Kafui Attoh 

The 2005 NYC transit workers strike, led by Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 under Roger Toussaint, remains deeply relevant to American workers in 2025. It highlights enduring lessons about labor militancy and the challenges of taking bold action in the face of legal repression and public sector austerity. The strike was a rare instance of a major U.S. union defying anti-strike laws—specifically New York’s Taylor Law—shutting down a city of millions to protect pension rights and resist a two-tier workforce.   How did TWU Local 100 mobilize an entire city to support workers, despite a hostile, well-funded corporate media campaign to vilify transit workers? What was won—and lost—as a result of the strike? What are the key lessons?   Join us on the 20th anniversary of the historic 2005 transit workers strike to learn from Roger Toussaint, former president of TWU Local 100; Joshua Freeman, labor historian and author of Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II; and Kafui Attoh, Professor of Urban Studies at CUNY SLU.