Low-Earning Degrees Will Soon Lose Access to Federal Loans—Is Yours on the List?

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) created a new system of accountability for higher education programs that depend on federal subsidies—colloquially known as the “Do No Harm” principle. Degrees and certificates which fail to increase their graduates’ earnings potential are on notice—within a couple years, they could lose access to federal student loans. Last week, the Education Department convened a negotiated rulemaking committee to draft regulations to implement this provision of OBBB.

(For more on the regulations that emerged from that committee, see my companion post .) To aid the process, the Department released a preliminary dataset —officially the 2026 Program Performance data; unofficially the One Big Beautiful Dataset—including nearly 50,000 degree and certificate programs and