How the U.S. Congress Is Threatening the Future of Christian Higher Education

"Salt and light can't be measured in dollars and cents"

In fourteen years of blogging, I’m not sure that I’ve ever encouraged readers of The Pietist Schoolman to contact their congressional representatives. But then I’ve never encountered the possibility of the U.S. Congress passing a bill that so directly threatens Christian colleges and universities like the one I work for. And since the Christian college-educated leader of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate says he wants to get the “Big, Beautiful Bill” on the desk of President Trump by the 4th of July, time is running out in which citizens can influence the lawmaking process.¹

Public domain/Wikimedia

With all the noisy debates swirling around this bill, you may not have heard much about what it means for higher education. I hadn’t, at least, until one of my colleagues shared a message from David Hoag, the new president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), warning that the bill includes “an accountability framework that would have serious and disproportionate consequences for service-oriented programs, such as teaching, counseling, and ministry programs.” Since those are disproportionately popular fields at CCCU schools like Bethel, that “proposed metric deals a devastating blow to faith-based institutions.”

To understand just what’s in the bill and why it’s such bad news for private religious schools like the mostly evangelical members of the CCCU, I’ll recommend to your attention this analysis by David Basinger, recently retired as chief academic officer at Roberts Wesleyan University. He notes that the bill would reduce the benefits of Pell Grants and federally subsidized loans, but the proposal that’s most worrisome for faith-based universities creates new program requirements for financial aid eligibility. Here’s how Basinger summarizes this facet of the bill — and why it threatens schools like mine:

• New Debt-to-Income Ratio Requirement. Academic Programs (majors) will be evaluated based on how much debt a graduating student will carry compared to projected post-graduation earnings. Students in programs where typical debt exceeds a set percentage of projected income could lose access to federal aid.

• New Earnings Threshold. Programs must demonstrate that graduates will earn more than the average high school graduate in their region. If not, the program may be labeled as “low value,” and students enrolling in the program may lose or have restricted access to federal aid.

The impact of these program-focused financial aid changes will also disproportionately affect Christian Institutions.

Tying financial aid to debt-to-income ratios and earning thresholds inherently disadvantages programs that produce service-minded graduates enrolled in programs (majors) such as K–12 teaching, Social work, Counseling, Pastoral ministry, and Nonprofit and community leadership, where salaries are often historically low, even in comparison to those in the region who haven’t gone on to college after high school.

While most colleges/universities offer many of these “low value” programs, Christian institutions are disproportionately invested in such fields. As noted before, students at Christian colleges and universities pursue service careers at a rate three times higher than their peer institutions.

We hear all the time that our constituents are worried about “mission drift.” If so, they should oppose the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” For if it were to be signed into law as is, the bill would not just cause “drift” — it would forcibly wrench Christian colleges and universities away from their mission in at least three ways.

First, it feeds the notion that the only college “return on investment” that matters is a high salary, and so pushes Christian universities to conform to an economic pattern of this world (to paraphrase the Apostle Paul) rather than to transform students by renewing their minds through the wide variety of academic fields whose study can glorify God and ultimately benefit our neighbors.

Second, Hoag warns that this part of the bill “would effectively punish institutions for equipping students to follow their faith-driven callings to serve their communities.” As part of a larger commitment to the Christian idea of vocation, we try to help students to hear God’s call to work at the intersection of personal giftedness and societal need. And that sometimes means followers of Jesus are being called towards careers that the free market doesn’t compensate as well as it does the types of employment most privileged by the proposed accountability framework.

As Basinger explains, “the mission of these schools includes a commitment to help meet the immense social, emotional, and spiritual needs not only of the local community but also at the state, national, and international level. Especially hard-hit would be theology programs, with a preliminary analysis showing that more than 50% of such programs at Christian institutions would fail to meet the bill’s thresholds.”

To put it in another way: Do you want your child to ignore her passions and abilities for pastoral ministry, K-12 education, or senior care because the federal government would rather that they spend their college tuition preparing to be a lawyer, engineer, or accountant?

Finally, as Asbury University president Kevin Brown warned in his own nuanced critique of this part of the bill, “we lose something when we reduce all value to dollars and cents.” I’ve argued elsewhere that colleges should resist pressures to define the good life in a purely materialistic way — for example, neglecting the spiritual dimensions of our lives. And at this Substack, I’ve argued that Christian colleges and universities serve the world best when they seek to be what Jesus called “salt and light.” To that end, we should keep preparing preachers, educators, and journalists whose relatively low salaries don’t reflect the immeasurable value of seeking and sharing the light of truth. We must continue to equip social workers, counselors, and nonprofit leaders who didn’t go into their professions for the promise of a middle-class lifestyle, but to act as agents of God’s love, peace, healing, reconciliation, and renewal in a world still wracked by greed, war, disease, prejudice, and neglect.

Salt and light can’t be measured in dollars and cents. And while our particular faith sends us out in this way, it’s for the common good of a religiously plural society.

The current composition of the Senate, showing the staggered terms of senators - CC BY-SA 4.0 (Bpmcneilly)

So let me encourage you to contact your senators, encouraging them either to oppose this bill or at least to amend the college accountability metric so as to include what Basinger calls “a service-based exemption or alternative standard that accounts for vocation-driven fields.”

1. Sen. John Thune not only attended Biola University himself, but one of his kids attended Bethel (majoring in History). From our one interaction at a graduation reception, he seems like a really nice guy.