1. United States
2. Letter

I oppose your administration’s policy of cutting federal student-loan access for programs whose graduates do not earn enough money. Once again, your administration has managed to identify a real problem and choose almost exactly the wrong solution. If people in certain professions are not earning enough, then perhaps the problem is that they are not being paid enough. That is certainly true in mental health. I am a licensed mental health professional with a master’s degree, and I have spent more than 20 years serving Texans. Much of my career has involved Medicaid, where reimbursement has often been far too low. My education was not unnecessary. My work was not unnecessary. The pay was inadequate. So naturally, your administration’s answer is not to ask why highly trained professionals are underpaid. It is to make it harder for the next generation to obtain the education required to do the work. Brilliant. And this is bigger than mental health. I am opposed to the entire premise that education is only worthwhile if it produces a sufficiently large paycheck. English matters. History matters. Religious studies matter. The humanities matter. Education matters. Social work matters. Healthcare matters. Human knowledge matters even when Wall Street has not assigned it a sufficiently impressive salary. Your administration has spent years attacking, weakening, or making access to education more difficult, and at some point the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. It certainly looks as though you are working very hard to make it harder for Americans to become educated. And yes, less educated populations may be easier to manipulate. That is one reason a healthy democracy should want exactly the opposite: an educated population capable of reading critically, understanding history, evaluating evidence, recognizing propaganda, and thinking for itself. America does not become stronger by becoming less educated. You do not solve low wages by making people less educated. You do not improve a profession by making it harder to enter. And you do not help Americans by closing doors to education because our economy has chosen to underpay the people on the other side of them. If these professions do not pay enough, fix that side of the equation. Improve wages. Improve Medicaid reimbursement. Deal with the power of insurance companies. Invest in healthcare, education, and the people doing socially necessary work. Stop treating education itself as the problem. We see what these policies are doing. They are narrowing opportunity, particularly for ordinary Americans who cannot simply write a check for graduate school or college. They will leave fewer people able to obtain education and fewer people able to enter professions this country actually needs. That is not making America stronger. It is making America poorer, less educated, and less capable. Please reverse this policy.