WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – A new U.S. Department of Education (DOE) rule aimed at curbing “useless” degree programs that leave students high in debt but short on career prospects could have unintended consequences for religious education, several leaders of Christian colleges are warning.
Tucked within President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) last year was a so-called “do no harm” standard for federal student loan eligibility, which would require eligible degree programs to yield higher earnings for graduates than those without the degree. Last October, American University estimated that only about 1.8 percent of overall students were in programs likely to be negatively impacted by the change.
On April 20, DOE published regulations implementing the new rule by “replacing the former debt-to-earnings (‘D/E’) metric with a revised earnings premium measure, expanding transparency, and strengthening institutional compliance standards.” A “revised version of the earnings premium measure would apply to both GE [gainful employment] and non-GE programs; those failing the earnings premium measure in two of three consecutive years would lose Direct Loan eligibility, though limited extensions may be granted when an orderly program closure […] is in students’ best interest.”
The changes “aim to incentivize institutions in every sector of higher education to offer programs that deliver economic value, enhance data accessibility for students, and protect taxpayers and students through stricter oversight and comprehensive disclosures on program outcomes.”
But while the rule appears inspired by the prevalence of politicized academic programs such as “gender studies” or “queer theory” that train for left-wing ideology with little practical application to successful careers, Christianity Today reports that the heads of religious schools have held dozens of meetings with lawmakers to convey fears that religious education could be caught in the crossfire.
Under DOE estimates, 53 percent of religion and religious studies bachelor degrees would be deemed “failing” under the new rules, and 89 percent of master’s degrees for the same. Financial gain is, of course, not the primary consideration in pursuing religious training, and the much smaller student counts of religious degree programs, particularly at smaller schools, also throws off attempts to draw direct comparisons between them and secular, career-focused learning tracks.
“It’s an existential threat to the future of religious higher education in the US—I don’t think that’s an overstatement,” said Philip Dearborn, president of the Association for Biblical Higher Education. “It came out of left field.”
“Churches are going to need leaders and leaders are going to have to be trained,” he added. “Whether we do it through our current understanding of how it goes, or a new way of thinking, I’m confident the church will rise up and figure it out. It sure would be nice if our government allowed our students to use loan dollars as well as grant dollars.”
“An accountability framework that reduces a faith-based school’s value to the future earning potential of graduates will minimize or alter its self-understanding and effectively punish those institutions for advancing a service ethos driven by their religious convictions,” warned Asbury University president Kevin Brown in June 2025, before the BBB became law.
“If folks want to get their degrees in these areas, but they’re not eligible for financial aid, it’s going to significantly impact the religious workforce,” said Frank Yamada, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools. “In many Christian traditions now, there are often more job openings or calls available than there are candidates to fill those calls.”
The attempt to crack down on “junk degrees” comes follows a long, ongoing history of discontent with American institutions of higher education, which have long been recognized as heavily dominated by left-wing bias and historical revisionism, conditioning students to reject religion, traditional morality, and free markets, and to view America as a uniquely malignant force in the world, a society systemically rigged against the poor and minority groups.
This bias has also made them breeding grounds of intolerance for dissenting views, the extent of which has been grimly highlighted over the past year by the alarming number of professors who have publicly mocked or celebrated the murder of Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk.
The toll of such an activist bent often extends well beyond politics. In 2024, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.