Dorothy

Amid a shaky job market, rising tuition and ballooning student loan balances, more young adults are questioning whether a college degree is worth it, several studies show. At the same time, students across majors overestimated the future value of their degrees, Clever found.

About 974,000 recent graduates aged 20 to 24 will be hired at small businesses (firms with one to 49 employees) during the 2026 hiring season, from April through September, according to a recent report from payroll and benefits platform Gusto. It’s a small bump from last year’s onboarding of 962,000 early-career workers, but the market has still not fully returned to the COVID years of 2020 to 2022, when employers went on a hiring blitz. Still, there’s also been improvement with net new grad job creation; it’s crept up from a low of 60,000 in 2023 to over 100,000 in 2026.

Earlier this month, the Department of Education proposed a new rule that would cut off federal student loan access to college programs whose students earn too little after they graduate. For undergraduate programs, those diploma holders would generally need to earn at least as much as young workers with only a high school degree. For graduate programs, graduates would need to beat a benchmark based on workers with only a bachelor’s degree. In certain cases, programs that fall short could also lose access to Pell Grants.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is rewriting higher education finance The new rule stems from President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and could be finalized as early as July 1. IRS data would be used to calculate the median earnings of graduates and determine if the programs are leaving graduates better off financially than before they started. Programs would have to fail the earnings test in two out of three years before losing federal loan eligibility. In the meantime, flagged programs would be required to notify current and prospective students of their “low earning outcome” status.

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a press release the new proposal will expand accountability—and will result in taxpayers not having to subsidize postsecondary education programs that leave graduates in a financial hole.

The new rule also puts in place an aggregate lifetime loan limit of $257,500, which includes undergraduate loans and some grad PLUS loans. Borrowers who retain eligibility for grad PLUS loans by staying continuously enrolled in their program will not be subject to the new aggregate limit during their exemption period of up to three years, or their expected time to credential, whichever is shorter.