In recent months, the Department of Education has been working to implement a law called the Student Tuition and Transparency System, or STATS. The law, originally part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, says that if the average graduate of some program at a university does not have earnings at least as high as the average person with only a high school diploma, then that program will no longer be able to receive federal loans.  

Steve Wolma, vice president for enrollment management, said, “The concern is that it’s going to prevent us from being able to offer federal student loans in programs that traditionally don’t earn a ton of money when they graduate.”

The meaning of “program” in this context is decided by the Classification of Instructional Programs code which is a number the DOE uses to represent specific fields of study. It is often somewhat synonymous with “major,” though not always.    

Similar legislation has existed for some time, according to Justin Heinzekehr, director of institutional research and assessment. STATS requires that Goshen College reports specific information about alumni, but Heinzekehr said, “A lot of the data that we’re pulling is not necessarily new data.”

Previously, GC had to provide a similar report thanks to a law called Fair Value Transparency and Gainful Earning, or FVT/GE, which was established through the DOE during the Biden administration. 

However, there are some critical differences between the two institutional reporting laws. According to Heinzekehr, FVT/GE collected data for all programs, but only enforced any kind of effects on loans when it came to programs that were focused specifically into certain “gainful employment programs,” such as licensure in education or a degree in nursing. 

Heinzekehr said, “So now the new legislation says we’re treating all programs the same, whether or not they were supposed to get you to a certain licensure or not.”

The goal of FVT/GE was to maintain some level of transparency for students pursuing undergraduate degrees. Heinzekehr said that the worry was “for-profit institutions taking advantage of students and, saying that they would be able to reach a certain salary, charging tuition and then not offering much support or anything.”

On the other hand, with regard to STATS, Wolma said, “There’s the teeth of actually losing federal funding for those programs which is how the federal government is going to try to discourage schools from offering these types of programs in the first place.”

The timeline of this law and the data that will be reported mean that it will not begin to affect GC this academic year, according to both Heinzekehr and Wolma. Even once it does, it is not certain which programs — if any — would not meet the threshold presented by STATS. 

Heinzekehr said, “Our internal data wouldn’t show any programs where, on average, the salary levels are lower than high school.” However, he also acknowledged that the data comes from alumni surveys, which are only responded to by 20-30% of alumni. 

Wolma echoed the statement. He said, “In the state of Indiana, in the area where we compare students who complete a bachelor’s, we are not in danger of running too low.”

Offering a message to students who might hear about this law, Wolma said, “I would tell them to just keep choos[ing] what they would like to study, pursue the types of careers they want to pursue. And, you know, we’re going to keep an eye on this. And as things get a little bit more certain, we’ll certainly make sure our students are aware of what’s going on.”