Among its many provisions, the “big, beautiful bill” that President Trump pushed through includes several that affect the federal government’s student aid programs. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Evan Osborne looks at the changes and the justification for continuing federal aid.

Osborne notes this important provision: “The graduate-school PLUS program, which previously allowed borrowing up to whatever a university charged for graduate education, was eliminated.” A good move — we lure far too many students into graduate programs that provide them with dubious degrees.

Osborne continues, “The trimming of these programs in the new legislation helps but so far only modestly. NPR also reports that limiting the subsidy to colleges for educating graduate students means that it will be ‘harder for low- and middle-income borrowers to attend pricier graduate programs.’ But that the programs are ‘pricier’ to begin with is the problem. The limiting of graduate loans will presumably force graduate programs to think twice about how much administrative and ideological padding they are willing to tolerate, but the same would occur in undergraduate education as well, loans that for now are unaffected. While it would be better if those higher-education subsidies were curbed as well, the new measures are at least a promising start.”

That’s the best that can be said — it’s a promising start. The goal ought to be to get the feds out of financing education entirely.