The University of California at Irvine just slashed its Merage Flex MBA tuition by $30,000 — dropping it to $99,000 — and they didn't do it because some progressive on the board had a change of heart about fleecing young Americans. They did it because President Trump's Working Families Tax Cut capped federal graduate student loans at $100,000 — $200,000 for law and medicine — and suddenly, magically, universities remembered how to do math.
Who could have predicted that when you stop handing colleges a blank government checkbook, they stop charging like they're selling timeshares on the moon? Oh, right. We all did.
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity, laid it out in a Townhall column published today. As Antoni wrote, "Colleges are cutting tuition for MBA programs. But it's not out of charity or because they got another taxpayer-funded subsidy." No kidding. It's because the gravy train finally ran out of track.
For decades, we were told by every "expert" in Washington that unlimited federal student loans were expanding access to higher education. More money for everyone! Degrees for all! The reality? Federal Reserve research and the National Bureau of Economic Research both confirmed what your Uncle Larry has been saying at Thanksgiving since 2005: flooding schools with guaranteed government cash just made them charge more. Antoni put it plainly — "endless government subsidies for education via ever-growing student loan availability have caused tuition to explode."
And explode it did. Want a master's in film and video studies from NYU? That'll run you an average of $168,000 in federal debt. Your median earnings after graduation? A whopping $47,000. Congratulations, you're now an underwater filmmaker in every sense of the word.
But here's what really burns. Under the Biden-Obama forgiveness schemes, roughly one-third of all student loan debt was simply written off. Meaning we — the taxpayers who skipped film school and went to work — got stuck with the tab. The Department of Education wasn't educating anyone. It was running a money laundering operation with extra steps: taxpayer dollars flowed to Washington, Washington handed them to 22-year-olds, 22-year-olds handed them to universities, universities built rock-climbing walls and hired diversity deans, and then Washington "forgave" the loans right back onto our tab.
Trump broke the cycle. The Working Families Tax Cut didn't require a single university to lower tuition. It didn't create a new bureaucracy. It didn't involve a 2,000-page bill nobody read. It simply said: the federal government will no longer write unlimited checks for graduate school. Figure it out.
And UC Irvine figured it out in about five minutes.
As Antoni noted, research confirms that "providing unlimited graduate school loans didn't expand access or increase degrees awarded." It just inflated the price. The same number of people got the same degrees — they just paid vastly more for them and carried crushing debt into their thirties and forties. The only winners were university administrators pulling six-figure salaries to oversee the grift.
This is the free market doing what decades of government "solutions" couldn't. No task force. No blue-ribbon commission. No Congressional hearings where senators pretend to be outraged for the cameras. Just a cap on the taxpayer credit card, and suddenly colleges discovered that maybe — just maybe — they don't actually need $130,000 for an MBA.
Watch closely over the next year. UC Irvine won't be the last. When the money spigot stops, prices come down. Every time. It's not complicated. It's Econ 101 — which, ironically, is one of the few courses that might actually be worth the tuition.