Christian Colleges Call New Federal Regulation an ‘Existential Threat’
>Though college presidents are in the middle of graduation season, Philip Dearborn, the head of the Association for Biblical Higher Education, found 21 of them willing to make a last-minute trip to Washington, DC, at the end of April.
>In dozens of meetings with lawmakers, they pleaded their case against a new Department of Education regulation they say could crater their programs. The regulation would label a bachelor’s or master’s program a “failure” if its graduates don’t earn more than their peers without the degree.
>Students in these “failing” programs would be ineligible for federal financial aid.
>The new rule portends a problem in particular for seminaries, theological schools, and Bible colleges at a time when clergy are aging and sometimes in short supply.
>By the government’s own estimate, 53 percent of bachelor’s degrees for religion and religious studies would be considered “failing” under this new metric. Those programs, which would not qualify for federal loans, are projected to have the highest failure rate of any undergraduate program.
>For master’s degrees, the outlook is especially bleak: The government estimates that 89 percent of religion or religious studies degrees would be considered failing.
>“It’s an existential threat to the future of religious higher education in the US—I don’t think that’s an overstatement,” Dearborn told CT. “It came out of left field.”