New Data in College Scorecard Promises to Lift Veil on ‘Debt Fueled’ Graduate-School Market

When a graduate of a Ph.D. program in public administration accumulates more student-loan debt than someone with a law degree from Harvard, what does that say about the market forces that guide graduate education?

And what potential earnings calculations would drive students at several overseas veterinary colleges to each take on nearly $300,000 in debt?

While much of the attention on the new program-level data in the College Scorecard, the federal government’s consumer-oriented online database, has focused on undergraduate education, some of the most eye-popping numbers involve graduate education.

So far, only the average debt levels for individual programs have been released; the earnings data are expected to come out this fall. But that hasn’t stopped policy geeks from crunching the numbers they have so far to see which programs deliver the biggest bangs for the buck and which are likely to leave borrowers busted.

The updated data, which are preliminary, were released this week. In addition to program-level data, they include more details on graduation rates and numbers from certificate-granting as well as degree-granting institutions.

“The troubling thing I saw was that among the hundreds of programs with debt levels over $100,000, many were at for-profit doctorate programs,” said Wesley Whistle, senior adviser for policy and strategy in New America’s Higher Education Initiative. “Some Ph.D. programs had higher debt levels than those of top-tier law schools.”

Graduates of a doctoral program listed in “public-administration and social-service professions” at the for-profit Capella University had a median debt of just over $139,000, he said, about $6,000 more than Harvard Law’s.

College recruiters bear some of the blame for promising students more than they can deliver, he said.

“They give them the blue-sky, dream-big vision that isn’t always attainable,” Whistle said. “Certain demographics are approached in a predatory way. They’re made to feel that they need a terminal degree to be competitive in a job market they may not be doing well in.”

Kevin Carey, who directs the education-policy program at New America, a think tank, tweeted that “probably the biggest near-term effect of program-level borrowing data will be piercing the veil over the debt-fueled graduate-school market, and folks, it’s not a pretty picture.”

Carey also pointed out how much debt people were taking on to earn veterinary degrees at colleges in the Caribbean, Scotland, Australia, and other overseas locations.

Ben Miller, vice president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, pointed out that “the data show that within a program type, the places that produce the highest debt levels for graduates are not necessarily the places regarded as the highest quality. We knew that at the undergraduate level,” he added, because prestigious colleges typically have plenty of money to pour into scholarships.

But the fact that, at the graduate level, students graduating with the highest debts may be the least likely to be able to pay them off should trouble educators, Miller said.

“Transparency is not a replacement for accountability,” he added.

Take the master’s degree in business administration, for instance:

Here’s master’s in business administration, management, and operations. That Roseman University one better be pretty innovative to justify a debt level that requires making nearly $200k a year pic.twitter.com/DNU6jY4YUe

— Ben Miller (@EduBenM) May 22, 2019

Then there are law schools, where for-profit and third-tier institutions often command the dubious distinction of graduating students with the highest debts.

Students who attend high-priced law schools with lousy earnings potential may not have had many other options. “For someone who really wants to go to law school, you can tell them until they’re blue in the face” that it won’t pay off, but they’ll probably still go, Miller said.

In a Twitter thread, Miller speculated on how much graduates of different programs would have to earn to pay off their debt in a manageable way. For his purposes, that meant spending no more than 8 percent of one’s income on repaying loans.

Based on the figures in the scorecard, Miller estimated, graduates of the University of Southern California’s master’s degree in social work would have to earn $117,000 a year to keep their payments to that 8-percent level.

Given the wide range of debt taken on by a student seeking a master’s degree in public policy, the earnings data will raise “some fun questions,” Miller tweeted. “Like will that Stanford degree really produce 167% of the earnings at the University of Michigan or 290% of the income at Univ of Wisconsin to justify that debt difference?”

Without the accompanying earnings data, “it’s hard to contextualize which programs give the most bang for the buck,” said Michael Itzkowitz, president of the Edvisors Group, which analyzes college quality.

“We all want to figure out which programs leave students with high debts and low salaries,” said Itzkowitz, who directed the College Scorecard under President Barack Obama. Assuming the earnings data are released this fall, “we should have that information soon.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.