Twenty-seven percent of American students borrow an average of about $40,000 in federal loans to pay for college. But for students considering certain acting programs, access to those loans could soon be at risk. Under a new Department of Education provision, tying federal loan eligibility to graduate earnings, Congress has a new warning: Buyer beware.
In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, which included a “Do Not Harm” provision aimed at holding college programs accountable for graduates' earnings. Under the new rule, programs could lose access to federal student loans if, four years after graduation, their alums earn less than working adults in the same state who never attended college. Graduate programs face a similar test: Their alums must earn more than those workers with only a bachelor's degree. Using 2025 earnings data, programs that fail the test could be disqualified from loan eligibility beginning in 2028.
The Department of Education describes this as “commonsense” accountability. “If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers,” Deputy Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement in July.
Thirty-eight percent of at-risk undergraduate programs are arts-related. Under “Do No Harm,” 48 undergraduate theater programs in 28 states are at risk of losing access to federal loans, making it the fifth-most-imperiled field, with fine art and studio art having the most programs listed.
Those programs span the higher-education landscape, from rural state schools to flagship research universities, from colleges in industry hotbeds to private liberal arts schools like Bennington College, whose theater program was recently ranked third in the country by the Princeton Review.
The federal government hasn’t always measured the value of theater training in economic terms. In 1935, Congress unanimously chartered the American National Theatre and Academy, whose mission included encouraging the study of acting in colleges and establishing the National Theatre Conservatory, which provided free tuition to MFA students until it closed in 2012. At the time, lawmakers described the legislation as a patriotic observance of the benefits and value of art. Nearly a century later, “Do No Harm” introduces a different stance: The value of art is measured by what graduates earn.
Today, theater programs face an uncomfortable reality: Debt can constrain early-career artists, and increasingly available data on earnings outcomes are difficult to ignore, given the student debt crisis impacting 42.5 million Americans. Acting gigs are competitive, and compensation varies considerably.
But early earnings might not tell the whole story. Representatives from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) see a “sizable increase in earnings between 3 and 10 years after graduation,” noting that “[E]arly earnings do not paint the full picture.” SNAAP data shows that almost 14 percent of theater undergraduates enroll in grad school within three years after graduation, while 60 percent of employed theater alumni eventually work in education. But that kind of career takes time.
Even before programs begin losing federal loan eligibility under “Do No Harm,” some colleges are already weighing the new rule as they make decisions about vulnerable programs.
On April 1, Kathy Johnson, the president of the University of New Orleans (UNO), a public commuter college in Louisiana’s largest city, announced via email that nine undergraduate and graduate programs would be modified, consolidated, or “taught "out” (that is, discontinued). Theater was one of two UNO programs to have both its undergraduate and graduate programs cut—the other was elementary and special education.
Internal communication shared with Backstage evidences that the university’s senior administration cited “Do No Harm” to faculty as a primary rationale for dissolving its theater program. The university, which has since been restructured and renamed as LSU New Orleans, did not reply to a request for comment.
But “Do No Harm” was hardly the program’s only problem. Actor John Neisler, a 2015 graduate of UNO’s three-year “scrappy” MFA program who now teaches as an adjunct, says the theater department has already been weakened by COVID shutdowns, low enrollment, deferred maintenance, and state budget cuts.
“If I had to describe what has happened to our dear theater department, it has really died a death of a thousand cuts,” Niesler recounts. “When faculty members retired, they were not replaced. They relied first on adjuncts, and now, of course, the adjuncts are going away as well, as they try to starve out the program.”
Students marked the program’s closure with a funeral, placing a prop coffin from the department’s scenic shop stuffed with archived production posters in the amphitheater by the university’s administration building. Since the announcement, nearly half of those theater students have dropped or transferred, according to inside sources.
The potential consequences extend beyond the programs themselves. Evan Yionoulis, dean of the tuition-free David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre, argues that “Do No Harm” could impact who could receive training in the first place. “To deprive young artists of the ability to fund their educations through federal loans would unfairly penalize students from lower-income backgrounds and advantage those with generational wealth, impoverishing the artistic dialogue for us all.”
So what does this mean for prospective acting students?
For students currently enrolled in a program that fails to meet the earnings test, federal regulations won’t hit immediately. The first cuts will occur in 2028. But experts are advising schools to immediately assess the viability of failing programs internally, as UNO did.
For students and families weighing their options, “Do No Harm” makes it harder to punt a potentially burdensome financial fate to a later date. The Department of Education’s College Scorecard website allows students to compare a school’s costs, debts, and earnings, while the Census’ Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes Explorer website tracks earnings trends over time, state-by-state, for various degrees.
But the numbers can only mean so much. As SNAPP’s research suggests, actors’ earnings four years after graduation may look very different from their earnings a decade out. And the choice of a program can shape an artist’s choices long before or after predetermined mile markers.
“Surely any culture worthy of the name values art for its own sake,” says Neisler of UNO. “And if they value art for its own sake, they must value the artist for their own sake.”
For prospective acting students considering collegiate training, “Do No Harm” puts an old question in new terms: What’s that degree worth to you?
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 19 issue of Backstage Magazine.
