Why an earnings test raises uncomfortable questions about art, professional practice, and the value of a degree.
The Price of a Degree
The federal government has decided to ask a question higher education has long avoided. What is a degree worth? Under the U.S. Department of Education’s new earnings-accountability framework, undergraduate programs will be judged partly by whether their graduates earn more than workers whose highest level of education is a high school diploma. Most of the framework takes effect July 1, 2027, and a program that fails the earnings benchmark in two of three consecutive award years can lose access to federal Direct Loans. It is a tidy, if uncomfortable, answer to a question that has never been tidy.
There is an economic logic worth acknowledging. Students borrowing heavily for a degree have a legitimate interest in whether it is likely to improve their economic position, and the government underwriting those loans has an interest in the answer. A degree can be intellectually valuable and financially questionable at the same time. Dismissing financial return as an inadequate measure of education does not make it irrelevant—although higher education has an impressive ability to require a committee before holding one idea at a time.
The policy is likely to put particular pressure on programs in lower-earning fields, including parts of the arts and humanities, where the economic return of a degree may be harder to demonstrate through what graduates earn after completing it. Federal accountability operates at the program level, distinguishing programs by factors including credential level and Classification of Instructional Programs code.
This economic classification model could create a particular problem for design. In my experience, many of these programs are not only housed in art departments but also classified as art programs, even though their graduates increasingly work across technology, business, marketing, and other industries. The problem may therefore begin before any federal earnings test is applied. The government may see an art program because that is how the university itself has chosen to classify it.
What Markets Cannot Measure
Before turning to what this could mean for design programs specifically, it is worth acknowledging the larger problem with the government using economic outcomes to validate educational value. A philosophy degree is not worthless because an engineer earns more. Love, religion, literature, music, art, and the humanities remain places where human beings wrestle with questions markets and empirical methods are not designed to answer.
Science can tell us extraordinary things about how the world works. It cannot, by itself, tell us what makes a life meaningful, what is beautiful, or what we owe one another. David Hume famously identified the problem of moving from statements about what is to conclusions about what ought to be. Modernity has occasionally made a similar mistake, confusing our growing ability to measure things with our ability to determine what matters.
There is also a political dimension that complicates the economic argument. The current administration has challenged parts of higher education it considers ideological, with some of those programs existing alongside or within the same academic structures as programs in the arts and humanities that may become collateral damage.
When taxpayers are funding higher education, it is not unreasonable for the elected government to question whether particular programs serve a legitimate public purpose, including whether they contribute to open inquiry, intellectual diversity, or the pursuit of truth. The difficulty is that a program can become vulnerable for very different reasons, including lower graduate earnings, political scrutiny of its subject matter, or simply belonging to an academic category associated with both.
An argument about financial sustainability is not an argument for discarding fields whose value economic measures cannot fully capture. If society believes certain fields are worth preserving despite producing lower-paying careers, it can support them through institutional subsidies, targeted grants, public-service loan forgiveness, lower tuition, or other models that reduce dependence on individual debt. Asking students to borrow heavily for degrees associated with modest earnings, then using those earnings as evidence that the programs were not worth supporting, conflates whether a field deserves support with how its education should be financed.
My own instincts make this tension harder rather than easier. I am generally skeptical of asking taxpayers to subsidize educational programs at all, particularly when their public value is unclear. But if we are going to make the case for public support, I am not convinced that producing more programmers, scientists, business executives, or other high earners is necessarily a better investment than preserving disciplines concerned with ethics, history, literature, art, religion, and the humanities.
A society increasingly organized around technology, economic growth, and material production may have particular need for people trained to ask what any of it is for. We have to ask ourselves whether we need more Musks, Bezoses, and Zuckerbergs, or more Camuses, O’Keeffes, and C.S. Lewises. Their contributions are considerably harder to put on an earnings statement—but difficulty measuring something is not evidence that it has no value.
The Awkward Case of Design
Design occupies a less comfortable position in this debate because it is both an academic tradition and a professional field. Design education developed largely within art schools, drawing from typography, illustration, visual composition, and studio practice. Many programs remain there today, and students often arrive believing design is professionalized creativity — art with a client, a deadline, and perhaps slightly better odds of dental insurance. Yet many of those same students eventually work in fields shaped as much by research, technology, psychology, business, and human-computer interaction as by studio art.
This disciplinary problem has been visible for some time. Before entering academia, while I was still working professionally as a creative director, I published a 2019 article ominously titled The Death of Graphic Design. I argued that digital marketing, web development, UI, and UX were already absorbing more of the work designers were doing. I ended with a prediction that graphic design might one day become a smaller component of marketing, web development, or UI/UX degrees. Seven years later, I would qualify that prediction, but the underlying point has aged reasonably well. Professional boundaries moved faster than academic ones.
I know that trajectory personally. I entered design from an art-oriented perspective but increasingly gravitated toward systems-level work involving interfaces, interaction, technology, and user experience. A student can make a similar journey inside a curriculum still institutionally associated with the arts, then migrate into UX, interaction, interface, product, or systems-level work. The academic starting point and professional destination can describe two different disciplinary worlds.
The economic picture reinforces the disparity but does not tell us whether a particular program would pass the federal earnings benchmark. May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics data report a median hourly wage of $30.27 for graphic designers, roughly $62,960 yearly, compared with $50.00 an hour, or roughly $104,000 yearly, for web and digital interface designers. Those are occupational medians across experience levels, while the federal test looks at earnings a few years after graduation, so they cannot tell us whether a particular program will pass. The point is that “design” already contains professional destinations with substantially different labor-market profiles.
Imagine a design program in which three-quarters of graduates enter traditional graphic design while the remaining quarter move into higher-paying UX or interface roles. If all of them are evaluated as graduates of the same program, the earnings of the graphic-design majority could obscure the stronger economic outcomes of those entering UX.
The reverse is equally possible. Higher-paid UX graduates could raise the program’s overall earnings, making the economic outcomes of a predominantly graphic-design program appear stronger than those of most of its graduates. The problem is not simply that design might be classified incorrectly. A single classification can combine graduates moving into substantially different professions and make the resulting earnings figure a poor description of either group.
This is where UX, interaction, digital product, and interface design make the inherited categories particularly awkward. The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes digital interface work in terms of usability, functionality, navigation, and testing, while Nielsen Norman Group’s UX career research finds practitioners arriving from design, psychology, communication, computer science, and other fields.
Graphic design, illustration, branding, and print retain a stronger relationship to the arts. Yet contemporary design education often places these very different forms of practice under the same academic roof, usually within the arts, where the traditional identity of design increasingly struggles to describe the full discipline.
Design Without the Pedestal
None of this makes design a science, nor does it remove aesthetics, intuition, taste, or creative judgment. It places them inside constraints that distinguish professional design from artistic expression. A designer may adore a typeface, interaction pattern, color palette, or visual style, but the audience is under no obligation to share the enthusiasm. If users cannot read the text, complete the checkout, understand the information, navigate the interface, or trust the product, the designer’s affection is irrelevant.
Designers work for somebody and design for somebody. Their decisions exist inside systems of users, organizations, technologies, markets, regulations, and measurable consequences. Nielsen Norman Group ties UX to outcomes including usability, efficiency, conversion, and retention. Its purpose is to demonstrate design’s value, but those outcomes also reveal the constraints professional designers work within.
The obvious objection is that moving design closer to technology, communication, psychology, or business risks stripping away some of the studio traditions that have historically defined design education. Not all of those traditions necessarily need to be preserved, but some remain valuable. Studio education teaches making, critique, visual sensitivity, experimentation, ambiguity, and judgment in ways analytics dashboards and usability reports cannot.
A design program rebuilt entirely around market demand could produce technically competent graduates with little visual intelligence, historical awareness, or capacity for formal judgment. The goal should not be to sever design completely from the arts, but to stop treating its artistic foundations as a complete description of the discipline.
A stronger model would preserve visual composition, studio critique, craft, and design history while creating clearer pathways into research methods, usability and accessibility, behavioral psychology, analytics, and technology. Shared coursework with computer science, communication, psychology, or business need not turn design into any of those fields. It can acknowledge that contemporary designers increasingly move among them. Design's unique contribution may be precisely this ability to connect making and judgment with human behavior, communication, and systems.
Two Different Problems
There is still an uncomfortable tension here. An earnings metric asks salaries to carry more philosophical weight than they can bear, while universities can make the opposite mistake by invoking the intrinsic value of education to avoid questions about price, debt, employment, and professional preparation.
Economics and human value are not competing measurements of the same thing. They answer different questions. Art, philosophy, religion, literature, and the humanities deserve defenses that do not depend on salary. Professionally oriented design programs should also explain how their curricula relate to the professions they claim to prepare students for.
The federal framework makes that question unusually concrete because it evaluates programs rather than broad cultural categories. As mentioned earlier, a design program whose graduates move primarily into traditional graphic design may encounter a different economic environment from one whose graduates move into interface or product work, even if both programs share an art-school lineage or similar degree titles. The federal test does not resolve what design is, and salary data cannot settle where it belongs academically. It can, however, expose the cost of pretending that historical classification and professional destination are the same thing.
Universities are often structurally bad at this kind of interdisciplinarity. Departmental ownership, budgets, course requirements, and faculty lines reinforce the very boundaries contemporary design crosses. Imagine building a university today without inheriting its departments.
Would UX design naturally sit beside painting and sculpture? There is a case for it because visual language, creativity, critique, and making matter. It also has a plausible home somewhere between computer science, psychology, communication, and business. The difficulty of locating design is not necessarily evidence of institutional confusion. It may be evidence that the profession itself has become genuinely interdisciplinary.
An Opportunity Hidden in a Bad Metric
Universities should resist allowing earnings to become a substitute for meaning while taking seriously the economic consequences of the education they sell. Education can deserve subsidy because it contributes to culture, civic life, intellectual development, and human flourishing. Professionally oriented degrees can simultaneously be expected to maintain a recognizable relationship to the work students are likely to pursue. Those are not contradictory commitments.
For design education, the more interesting question is therefore not whether government will mistakenly classify design as art. It is whether universities will continue treating a degree’s historical home as though it fully describes the professional trajectories available within it. A student can begin in an art-rooted curriculum and leave for UX, interaction, interface, product, or systems-level work without experiencing that transition as a clean disciplinary break. The curriculum should recognize that movement rather than force it into an inherited box.
The arts and humanities deserve a defense stronger than salaries. Design deserves an academic structure that preserves what it learned from the studio while acknowledging what the profession has become. The federal earnings test is too crude to answer that question for universities. If it forces them to ask it more seriously, something worthwhile may still emerge.
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Federal pressure may force design education to rethink its identity was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
