The only thing more surprising about the Education Department’s proposed rule on college loans is that it took this long for common sense to prevail over the interests of Big College.

On Friday, the department issued a “notice of proposed rulemaking” that would, if implemented, block taxpayer-subsidized student loans for worthless degrees. To say that this is needed is a vast understatement.

As it stands, there is nearly $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, and “fewer than 40% of borrowers are in repayment, and nearly 25% of borrowers are in default,” notes The Federalist’s Breccan F. Thies.

Why? Because far too many students were suckered into borrowing money – with the loans heavily subsidized by taxpayers – for college degrees that guaranteed them nothing, other than delaying adulthood by four years while piling up debt.

Colleges and universities have made out like bandits from this scheme, which lets them create bogus majors, pad their payrolls with administrative jobs, and hike tuitions massively, knowing that taxpayers would cover the costs.

Joe Biden made the problem worse by telling students that they’ll never actually have to pay off their college loans.

President Donald Trump is, thankfully, trying to end this grift. The proposed rule would require “colleges and universities to be accountable for how much their graduates earn after leaving their programs, cutting off the institutions from accessing federal student loans if they leave them worse off financially,” says Bloomberg Government.

Once in place, colleges would have to prove that their graduates are making more than those who didn’t bother to go to college. Those obtaining master’s and doctoral degrees would have to earn more than those who just got a bachelor’s. If schools fail to do so for two years in a row, those programs would be cut off from federal loans.

We suspect that right now, colleges across the country are looking at their course offerings and panicking. Do they really think queer studies, social justice, peace studies, creative writing, anthropology, and various other pointless majors will pass muster? To say nothing of the create-your-own-majors that some colleges allow.

“The Trump administration’s proposed accountability framework is grounded in common sense: if postsecondary education programs do not leave graduates better off, taxpayers should not subsidize them,” said Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent in a press statement. 

We say “Amen!” to that.

The rule still needs to be finalized, but we can’t see any reason why the Education Department wouldn’t do so, or who could be opposed to it. Trump is taking other steps to tighten the rules on federal college aid, which now exceeds $275 billion a year, according to the College Board, and mainly just fuels tuition inflation.

This problem has festered for decades. So far, Trump is the only president who’s had the cajónes to take it on directly.

And for that, every taxpayer should be grateful.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board