As they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2025, Republicans faced a dilemma. They wanted to extend the tax cuts enacted during Donald Trump’s first term, a central priority of both the president and the party’s corporate and donor base. But because the tax extensions would blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the ten-year deficit projection, they risked losing the votes of fiscal hawks inside their caucus. 

So, Republicans went hunting for “pay-fors” to lessen the deficit damage. They axed tax credits for EVs and clean energy and decimated funding for Medicaid and SNAP. But in addition to these well-publicized cuts, they radically reduced federal student loan subsidies, including those for graduate students.  

Of course, they didn’t say out loud that they were reducing support for graduate education to finance tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. Instead, they and conservative think tanks argued for the cuts on other grounds. First, invoking the so-called Bennett Hypothesis—named after the former Education Secretary, William J. Bennett, who articulated the theory—they claimed that federal student aid enables colleges to raise tuition, and that cutting federal funding will therefore force tuition prices down. Second, channeling arguments made by pronatalists at places like the Heritage Foundation, they said that young people, especially women, spend too long in graduate school, delaying marriage and childbearing, and that shrinking higher-education subsidies will boost the fertility rate. 

These arguments point in opposite directions. The first claims that cutting federal loan support will make graduate education cheaper and therefore easier to earn, the other that those cuts will make grad school harder to pursue. Regardless, both converge on the same policy outcome: less federal money for graduate education, more for tax cuts.  

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which passed in July, reduces federal higher education spending by roughly $284 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, largely by tightening graduate student lending. It eliminates the Graduate PLUS program, which had allowed students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for graduate degrees. Instead, the legislation limits future loan amounts based on the type of graduate program: $50,000 per year and $200,000 total for “professional” degrees, $20,500 per year and $100,000 total for all others.  

To avoid a political fight about which degrees count as “professional,” lawmakers added a snippet of ambiguous language from an otherwise unrelated regulation. They directed the Department of Education to clarify the final definitions based on it. In November, a committee empaneled by the department released those definitions as a first step in writing the regulations that will implement the new law. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology, law, and clinical psychology were deemed “professional” and eligible for higher federal loan limits. Nursing, teaching, social work, physical therapy, physician assistant programs, and audiology were not. 

Such regulatory notices usually fly under the public radar, but this one hit a nerve. Roughly four million nurses and more than two million social workers, including teachers and therapists, read the rule the same way: as a declaration that their work does not count as a profession. Their unions and trade associations protested. A prairie fire of anger and ridicule spread on social media. National media outlets covered the controversy. Even The Onion weighed in (“White House Reclassifies Nursing as a Hobby”). 

“None of us anticipated the offense that would be taken by the term ‘professional,’” a member of the department’s rulemaking committee told me. In retrospect, however, it’s not hard to understand the anger. Nursing and social work are overwhelmingly female professions already facing shortages, burnout, and stagnant pay. Getting a raise in these fields often requires a master’s degree, and the Trump administration was putting up roadblocks. Nurses already absorb abuse from hospital administrators and arrogant physicians while doing the unglamorous work of keeping patients alive. To then be downgraded—symbolically and financially—by the federal government was seen as disrespect. “It’s just a smack in the face,” said Susan Pratt, a nurse who is also president of a union representing nurses in Toledo, Ohio. “During the pandemic, the nurses showed up, and this is the thanks we get,” she told the AP.

Public outrage has been so intense that, in December, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asked the Education Department to restore nursing to the list of professional degrees.  

If the new federal graduate school loan regime is proving to be a disaster politically, it is not much better as policy. Robert Kelchen, a higher education policy professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville (and data editor of the Washington Monthly college rankings), notes that loan limits only make sense if they follow outcomes—either to prevent students from taking on unsustainable debt or to discourage enrollment in programs with poor repayment prospects. By those metrics, nursing stands out for the opposite reason. It has strong debt-to-earnings ratios, strict licensing requirements, sustained labor-market demand, and a clear social return. If taxpayers are going to subsidize any graduate profession, nursing is among the safest investments. 

Capping graduate degree loans at $20,500 annually might sound reasonable to conservative lawmakers trying to fill a self-created budget hole, but it makes less sense if you’re a working nurse or physical therapist entering an expensive, clinically intensive program in a high-cost area without family wealth. Pair that cap with the elimination of Grad PLUS and a tighter income-driven repayment regime, and the math will not work for many prospective nurses and teachers. Some will never apply. Others will turn to private loans. Many will walk away. 

Of course, there are universities charging outrageously high tuition for certain graduate degrees that don’t lead to commensurately high incomes; some of those programs were created precisely to take advantage of unlimited federal graduate student loans. As the Washington Monthly reported in 2024, the worst offenders are often elite schools. For instance, Northwestern University offers a master’s in counseling that saddles average graduates with $153,657 in debt, who go on to earn only $56,897 on average annually five years later. (By comparison, many regional public universities offer the same degree at a fraction of the cost, and their graduates earn more.) Lawmakers could have protected grad students from such predatory programs—and taxpayers from picking up the tab when those students can’t repay the loans—by directing the Education Department to limit graduate loans based on the average earnings of specific degrees or programs. Instead, they rushed through poorly worded legislation that blew up on the launchpad.  

Nor do their intellectual justifications hold up. The Bennett Hypothesis that higher federal student financial aid leads to higher tuition has been heavily studied, and evidence for it is mixed at best. Meanwhile, the pronatalist argument that reducing graduate education loan support will boost the birth rate isn’t looking so good, considering the damage likely to be done to the careers of many who deliver babies for a living.  

In one respect, however, the GOP’s gutting support for graduate education has been a success: it helped deliver the votes for nearly $5 trillion in tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy (and massive federal deficits to boot). Tens of millions of nurses, teachers, social workers, and their families are likely to remember that in the midterms. 

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At a community college in San Diego, a student earns an associate’s degree and lands a healthcare job that doubles her family’s income within six months of graduation. Three counties over, another graduate with the same degree struggles to find work that pays more than the typical high school graduate. The schools cost the same. The difference in economic mobility is everything. 

How We Measure Economic Mobility by State

About a decade ago, the federal government launched an initiative to highlight such disparities and help students determine where to get the best bang for their educational buck. This project, known as the College Scorecard, now provides 2,000 pieces of information on over 5,000 institutions. 

Each of these data points tells a story—one that often results in the American Dream being fulfilled or, at its worst, a student ending up worse off than where they began. Fortunately, the trends we glean from these data have given us a valuable fact that can work in our favor: Opportunity is not limited to one place, one institution, or even one type of postsecondary institution. And, 50 states mean 50 pockets of opportunity—accessible institutions delivering real economic opportunities exist nationwide, ready to be identified and amplified. (See the Washington Monthly’s 2025 College Guide and Rankings here.)  

California Case Study: Transparent Data, Bigger Gains

Some states are already taking this step. For example, over the past two years in California, we’ve observed a shift in the narrative among higher education leaders, who now demand better return on investment and improved economic mobility outcomes for every student. Using federal data to showcase statewide efforts has made this possible. 

The HEA Group’s and College Futures Foundation’s—two organizations that focus on postsecondary success and economic mobility—recent analyses reveal significant disparities in opportunities and outcomes across California institutions, even among those that seem similar on paper. (Note: I’m the HEA Group’s founder and president.) Some colleges launch students into careers where they can earn enough to recover their educational costs in less than a year. Others lead to low earnings and high expenses. This single choice can greatly influence students’ life paths. 

This work has also identified the institutions that provide the most economic mobility. These postsecondary options are more accessible, affordable, and show stronger post-college earnings for low- and moderate-income learners. Cal State LA, for example, enrolls 66 percent low- and moderate-income students, costs only $18,300 for a bachelor’s degree, yet shows these students earning $26,677 more than high school graduates—allowing them to recoup their costs within just 0.7 years and move from low-income backgrounds to middle-class earning potential. And there are many more that do the same.  

A new project broadens this focus on value to community and career colleges across 12 economic regions in California, ensuring that over one million students pursuing certificates and associate’s degrees have the information they need to achieve a strong return on their investment. 

The top 25 performing institutions overwhelmingly serve learners from low-income backgrounds, charge less than $5,000 annually, and show their students earning at least $10,000 more than a high school graduate within the state. These community and career colleges deliver real and rapid economic returns. 

Closing Gaps: When Colleges Undercut Economic Mobility

Through these data, institutional leaders and policymakers can also identify areas for improvement. Out of the 327 community and career colleges analyzed, 95 show the majority of former students earning less than a high school graduate with no college experience. Instead of providing economic mobility, these institutions may perpetuate socioeconomic inequality, leaving learners and the state economy worse. 

Research doesn’t do much if it’s used to scratch an intellectual itch. Such insights can be the blueprint for improving higher education in every state. 

Rural students across America—from farming communities in Iowa to mining towns in West Virginia—deserve the same opportunities to build better lives through education. A community college in rural Kentucky that efficiently prepares students for skilled trades or healthcare careers can be just as transformative as any urban institution—if we measure success by what matters most to students and their families. 

This dream becomes a reality through effective research, advocacy, and financial support. More students in more places receive more opportunities. 

Philanthropic organizations should focus on research to identify scalable practices across all states. Policymakers should prioritize funding for institutions that promote economic mobility, using data to allocate resources for maximum impact. College accreditors must make employment outcomes central to evaluations nationwide. Additionally, institutions should include these success metrics into their strategic plans. 

The Bottom Line: Economic Mobility for Every Student

Students aren’t asking for guarantees—they realize that success demands effort. Still, they deserve institutions that can show solid returns on investment and assist them in creating better lives. 

The promise of higher education can only be fulfilled by colleges in each state that provide real value. Some states and organizations have demonstrated that change is possible, and we can learn much from their leadership. The future belongs to those willing to follow their example. Our students—regardless of their background—deserve nothing less. 

The post 50 States, 50 Opportunities for Economic Mobility  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the past two decades, the Washington Monthly has included in its annual college rankings measures of a university’s research prowess—its record of producing the new scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing. This year, we’ve put those metrics into a separate ranking, the Best Colleges for Research, which appear at the end of this article. It is the only such ranking published by a journalistic outlet—and a necessary one, given the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on university research.

There are other reasons why we created this new research ranking. This spring, the organization that categorizes colleges, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, rewrote its definitions of what constitutes different types of institutions, including major research universities. We also decided this year to compare research universities to other types of institutions, like small liberal arts colleges that focus on teaching rather than research, to see which institutions are best at helping students succeed in their careers and engage as democratic citizens (see Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars). The only fair way to do that was to pull our research metrics into their own ranking. 

But most of all, at a time when the Trump administration is decimating funding for academic research, we wanted to illuminate the incredible benefits that America’s research universities provide to the country at large and to the states and regions where they’re located—and the unfathomable damage these cuts are likely to bring. 

Before we delve into the ranking, it’s important to understand how the United States built its world-class system of federally funded university-based research—a system that was neither inevitable nor, as we are now learning, invulnerable. In the early 20th century, Europe was the undisputed engine of scientific discovery. Aspiring top scientists didn’t dream of going to Harvard or Stanford. They went to Göttingen, where Max Born and Werner Heisenberg were pioneering quantum mechanics; to the Sorbonne, where Marie Curie revolutionized chemistry and medicine; or to Cambridge, where Ernest Rutherford and Paul Dirac rewrote the laws of atomic theory. A young New York–born physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer followed that path—studying at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory before earning his doctorate under Born in 1927. At the time, American universities were respected teaching institutions. But they stood on the periphery of the global scientific frontier.

That changed abruptly when the United States made scientific supremacy a national strategy during World War II. In 1939, Oppenheimer was lecturing at chalkboards at UC Berkeley. Just four years later, as part of the Manhattan Project, the University of California was contracted by the federal government to operate the Los Alamos Laboratory, with Oppenheimer leading thousands of scientists in one of the most ambitious research efforts ever under-taken. It wasn’t just the birth of the atomic bomb. It was also the birth of the modern American research university—powered by a new kind of partnership between public investment and university-led inquiry. For more than 80 years, that system has fueled nearly every major scientific and technological breakthrough of the modern era.

That success was the result of deliberate postwar planning—shaped in large part by Vannevar Bush, the former MIT engineering dean who oversaw wartime science policy. In 1945, Bush submitted a report to President Harry Truman titled Science, the Endless Frontier, which called for sustained federal funding of universities to conduct research both for specific goals—to combat disease, ensure national security, and raise living standards—but also to advance scientific knowledge for its own sake. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” he wrote. 

The system was designed to be decentralized, competitive, and entrepreneurial. Unlike European countries, in which most universities are operated at national or regional levels, the United States has a geographically dispersed array of state-owned and private nonprofit colleges and universities. Different federal agencies—the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, and so on—set the broad parameters for grants based on their own agency’s goals. But scholars anywhere in the country could propose specific research projects, and decisions on which would get funding were made not by federal officials but by peer review panels of scholars, also from around the country. The system incentivized states to invest their own tax dollars in their public universities by recruiting top scholars who could win federal research grants and top graduate students who could work on those grants. It was, in short, an American-style, market-based solution to the task of building scientific capacity. 

The scale of this transformation is hard to overstate. Before World War II, federal spending accounted for just 20 percent of all U.S. research and development. By the 1960s, it made up two-thirds. Federal support for university research rose from under $70 million in 1940 (about 1 percent of today’s levels, adjusted for inflation) to more than $20 billion by 2000. By then, American university labs had given the world the polio vaccine, the internet, satellite navigation, the MRI, and much more.

As of 2023, U.S. universities spent over $108 billion on research and development—more than half of it funded by the federal government. That spending underpins not just scientific progress but entire regional economies. It trains the STEM workforce, fuels innovation, and creates good jobs far from the coasts. According to economists across the political spectrum, university-based R&D delivers one of the highest returns on investment of any federal expenditure. It produces breakthroughs, but also pipelines: of talent, of human capital, and of opportunity.

The Best Colleges for Research ranking is like an MRI of that system. It rates 139 institutions that each spend at least $100 million annually on research based on four equally weighted indicators: total research spending, science and engineering PhDs awarded, faculty receiving major national awards, and the share of faculty elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

But a word of warning: This MRI was taken when the patient was at peak health. All the underlying data is from before January of this year, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. Since then, the NDF has frozen or canceled more than 1,700 grants, many of them focused on recruiting more women and racial minorities into STEM fields. The NIH faces proposed cuts of up to 40 percent for the fiscal year 2026 budget—jeopardizing over $10 billion in funding. The Trump administration effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling the billions in grants it once dispensed. The Departments of Energy and Defense have shifted green energy and climate funds elsewhere. And the Department of Education has opened more than 60 campus investigations and frozen billions in grants to universities. Trump officials have also proposed slashing university overhead reimbursements from 50-60 percent to 15 percent—effectively making much research unsupportable. 

The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the ranking is that the three universities at the top of the list—Stanford, MIT, Harvard—are precisely the kind you would target if you were Donald Trump and your aim was to punish elites in blue states. Another prestigious university, fifth-ranked Johns Hopkins, in deep blue Maryland, receives more federal research dollars than any university in the country. Those grant funds allow the institution to support more than 30,000 jobs in Baltimore and run the Applied Physics Laboratory, a critical player in U.S. missile defense and cybersecurity. But since Trump took office for the second time, Johns Hopkins has lost over $800 million in global health research—most of it when DOGE pulled the plug on USAID. The fallout: 600 clinical trials disrupted and vaccine development halted midstream. Consider those libs owned.

The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s not just elite private universities in blue coastal cities that rank highly on the list—and stand to lose big from Trump’s defunding of research universities. Like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, the cuts end up punishing the very people and places he claims to champion.

Five of the top 20 universities (including the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Michigan) as well as two dozen more on the list are in swing states that Trump barely won in 2024 and that will likely determine who wins the presidency in 2028. Nearly 50 other institutions that make up the Best Colleges for Research ranking are in red states, including Texas A&M (number 16), the University of Florida (27), and Purdue University in Indiana (29).

These universities are not just major recipients of federal research dollars. As our ranking shows, many of them outperform Ivy League schools in awarding the STEM PhDs that keep the economy humming and America competitive in the world. (See chart). 

These institutions, most of them public, train the bulk of the engineers who build America’s infrastructure, the chemists who power our labs, and the computer scientists who staff defense contractors and clean energy start-ups. They, too, are facing devastating cuts. Between February and March, DOGE slashed more than $74 million in federal research grants going to 19 colleges and universities in Georgia, including the notoriously woke Georgia Institute of Technology (note to Georgia Tech grads: that’s a joke!). Case Western paused hiring and travel to brace for a projected $39 million loss. Louisiana State University imposed a campus-wide hiring freeze and withheld 2 percent of all department budgets as a buffer. Penn State lost $10 million in grants—halting projects on HIV prevention, cervical cancer vaccines, and diagnostics for newborns. Administrators now advise faculty to strip keywords like diversity and climate from proposals to avoid triggering more cancellations.

A third pattern you might notice is that many of the universities at the top of our ranking are in a handful of the fastest-growing states—California, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Florida. That’s no coincidence. Remember that the system Vannevar Bush devised created incentives for states to invest in their public university systems. Not all states, however, acted on those incentives with the same intensity and focus. Those that made long-term bets on higher education, built centralized public university management systems, and kept in-state tuition low tended also to garner more federal research dollars and the corresponding economic growth. (See Christopher M. Mullin, “Florida’s Fresh-Squeezed Colleges.”) 

Other, smaller states never made that bet on a similar scale and simply do not have as many options. In places like Montana and Nebraska, the local land grant is often the only serious research institution. As Joseph Parilla, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, put it, “For a lot of places, [research] is the last remaining economic and innovation engine that gives them relevance in a modern, technology-driven economy.” In other words, federal research funding isn’t just science policy—it’s regional development policy. When it dries up, entire communities, not just institutions, suffer the consequences.

Our ranking reflects a system still running at high capacity. But the damage is already visible, and not just at Ivy League schools. Job offers to new PhDs are being rescinded. Labs are consolidating. Faculty are leaving. 

In Mississippi, a state Trump won by over 22 points, the mayor of Starkville is sounding the alarm. “Every time you touch the university, you, in effect, touch Starkville,” Mayor Lynn Spruill told The New York Times, after Mississippi State lost funding for a USAID aquaculture project. The school, which spent more than $150 million in federal research money last year, is now bracing for deeper cuts to engineering and agriculture programs—key anchors of the local economy.

And as our ranking shows, the consequences won’t be limited to blue states. The very regions Trump claims to fight for—rural America, red America—may be the ones hit hardest. What took 80 years to build won’t take 80 years to unravel. But it may take that long to build again.

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