State School Program Cuts in 2026: Which Majors Still Hit a $70K Starting Salary Before RAP Loan Payments Kick In
Your kid is choosing a major at a state school that just cut its philosophy department, shrunk its geology program, and quietly stopped admitting new students to three other majors. Nobody told you this when you toured campus. It happened because international enrollment — which quietly subsidizes tuition at a lot of public universities — fell hard enough that the university had to make cuts somewhere. The question you actually need answered isn't "is this a good school." It's "will the major my kid picks still exist, still be staffed, and still lead to a job by the time they graduate in 2030."
That's a different question than most college guidance answers. Here's the data that actually answers it.
Why Program Cuts Are Suddenly a Real Risk, Not a Hypothetical
The Hechinger Report's reporting on the University of North Texas is a useful case study: incoming president Harrison Keller inherited an enrollment crisis in his second year, driven largely by a drop in international students after federal visa denials and revocations accelerated. International students often pay full sticker price with no institutional aid, so their tuition cross-subsidizes everything else — including majors that don't generate much revenue on their own. When that revenue disappears, universities don't cut evenly. They cut the programs with the lowest enrollment and the weakest job-placement story first.
This isn't just a UNT problem. It's a structural exposure at any public university that leaned on international enrollment to balance the budget. Our nces_tuition_trends dataset shows in-state tuition and fees at public four-year schools have already climbed faster than the 20-year average in the years following enrollment shortfalls — schools raise prices on domestic students to fill the gap before they start cutting departments. So the sequence you should expect is: prices go up first, program cuts follow 12-24 months later, usually hitting humanities, some social sciences, and low-enrollment specialty majors hardest.
We wrote about the direct cost-comparison version of this in Falling International Enrollment Is Cutting College Programs: State School vs Private College vs Community College Transfer ROI for Business and CS Majors. This post goes one layer deeper: which specific majors survive the cuts, and what they pay if they do.
Which Majors Are Getting Cut — and Which Are Protected
Universities don't cut majors randomly. They cut based on enrollment size, cost-per-student to run the program, and — increasingly — post-graduation earnings, since state legislatures are tying funding to outcomes. Cross-referencing our major_outcomes dataset (280 rows sourced from the New York Fed's college labor market research) against college_scorecard employment data gives a reasonably reliable predictor of which majors are protected versus exposed.
| Major | Median Starting Salary | Employment Rate (1yr post-grad) | Program Cut Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Computer Science | $78,500 | 91% | Low — high enrollment, high revenue |
| Nursing (BSN) | $68,200 | 94% | Low — accreditation-protected, workforce demand |
| Business/Finance | $61,300 | 87% | Low-Moderate — high enrollment but easy to consolidate |
| Mechanical/Electrical Engineering | $74,900 | 90% | Low — expensive but revenue-positive |
| Psychology | $44,100 | 78% | Moderate — high enrollment, low revenue per student |
| Education | $41,800 | 82% | Moderate — protected by state mandates, underfunded |
| Fine Arts / Studio Art | $38,600 | 68% | High — low enrollment, high cost per student |
| Foreign Languages (non-Spanish) | $46,200 | 71% | High — smallest class sizes on campus |
| Anthropology/Sociology | $43,900 | 73% | High — frequently merged into other departments |
Source: Tuvelan's analysis of 11,994 proprietary data points across college_scorecard, major_outcomes, and bls_oes_wages, cross-referenced against reported program consolidation patterns.
The pattern is blunt: majors that already have weak employment rates and lower starting salaries are the same majors that get cut first when a university needs to save money — which means the "will this major still be offered when my kid is a junior" risk and the "will this degree pay off" risk are the same risk. That's worth sitting with. A major getting quietly phased out isn't just an inconvenience; it's often a lagging indicator that the outcomes were already weak.
This is the kind of cross-referenced analysis Tuvelan runs for you automatically — matching a specific school's program stability signals against the earnings data for the exact major your kid is considering, instead of you trying to reconstruct it from scattered scorecard files.
The New RAP Loan Plan Changes What "Affordable" Means
On July 1, nearly 46,000 borrowers applied for the new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) on day one, according to Under Secretary Nicholas Kent — reported by The College Investor. RAP replaced SAVE as the federal income-driven repayment option, and it works differently in a way that matters directly for major selection: your monthly payment is calculated as a percentage of your adjusted gross income, scaling from roughly 1% to 10% depending on income bracket, with a $10 monthly minimum and forgiveness after 30 years of qualifying payments.
That structure means your monthly loan burden is now mechanically tied to your starting salary in a much more direct way than the old fixed-payment plans. A psychology grad earning $44,100 and a computer science grad earning $78,500 aren't just earning different amounts — under RAP, they're also paying a meaningfully different share of that income toward the same-sized loan balance. Our federal_student_aid dataset shows the RAP payment curve is steep enough that the earnings gap between majors compounds into an even bigger gap in disposable income after loan payments, not just in gross salary.
Worked Example: $43,000 in Loans, Two Different Majors
Say your kid graduates with the national average federal loan balance for a bachelor's degree — about $43,000, per our education_defaults dataset. Here's how RAP plays out for two different majors, using each major's median starting salary from the table above.
Psychology major, $44,100 starting salary: Estimated RAP payment: roughly 4-5% of discretionary income, landing near $140-160/month in year one. Over a 30-year horizon at this income trajectory (psychology majors' earnings grow slower — our bls_cps_earnings data shows a flatter 20-year wage curve for this field), a meaningful share of borrowers in this income band never fully amortize the loan and rely on eventual forgiveness — which comes with its own tax and timeline tradeoffs.
Computer science major, $78,500 starting salary: Estimated RAP payment: closer to $420-460/month in year one, reflecting the higher percentage-of-income tier. But because CS earnings grow faster (our major_outcomes data shows median CS earnings crossing $110K within 10 years for grads employed in-field), the loan gets paid off well ahead of the 30-year forgiveness window, and total interest paid over the life of the loan is meaningfully lower.
The higher earner pays more per month but comes out ahead over the life of the loan — a counterintuitive result if you're only looking at the monthly payment line item, which is exactly why looking only at "can we afford the monthly payment" is the wrong frame. Your kid's specific numbers will differ based on loan balance, state, and actual starting offer — this is illustrative math, not a quote. You can model this for your specific situation at Tuvelan.
Employment Rate Isn't the Same as "No Skills Gap"
Here's a wrinkle that gets missed in most college-planning conversations: a major can have a decent employment rate and still leave a graduate underemployed. Our bls_oes_wages and census_acs_education datasets together show occupation-level detail that college_scorecard's broader "employed 1 year after graduation" metric doesn't capture — specifically, what share of graduates in a major end up in jobs that actually require their degree versus jobs that would accept any bachelor's degree.
Psychology is the clearest example: a 78% employment rate sounds fine until you see that a large share of those jobs are outside the psychology field entirely — retail management, general administrative roles, customer service — paying closer to $38,000 than the $44,100 major-specific median. This is the skills gap in practice: not "can't get hired," but "hired into something the degree didn't specifically prepare them for, at a lower wage than the major-specific data implies." Business and CS majors show a much tighter alignment between degree and job title, which is part of why they're more resistant to program cuts in the first place — the outcomes data holds up under scrutiny.
We covered the deeper mechanics of this gap in Emerging Tech vs. CS vs. Business at $28K State School: When Employment Rate Data Reveals a $700K Career ROI Gap, and the trade-off between vocational paths and traditional degrees in Which College Majors Pay Off $100K in Student Debt? STEM vs. Business vs. Humanities 20-Year ROI When Loan Forgiveness Is Dead.
What to Actually Check Before You Commit
Before your kid enrolls, get three answers, in this order: what's the major-specific employment rate and starting salary (not the school-wide average), what's the program's enrollment trend over the last three years at that specific school (falling enrollment is the leading indicator of a future cut), and what would the RAP monthly payment actually be at that major's realistic starting salary against your kid's expected loan balance. Most families get none of these answers before signing the enrollment deposit — they get a campus tour and a financial aid letter that shows net price, not outcomes.
That's the exact gap Tuvelan was built to close: matching a specific school, specific major, and specific loan scenario against real earnings and employment data, instead of hoping the brochure numbers hold up. Run your kid's actual college list — the schools, the majors, the aid offers — through Tuvelan before you commit to a decision this size. It's the difference between a guess and a number you can defend.
Sources
- As international enrollment falls, U.S. students face program cuts and higher prices — The Hechinger Report
- Nearly 46,000 Borrowers Applied For The New RAP Student Loan Plan On Day One — The College Investor
- This Fort Lauderdale Hotel Is All About The City, Not the Beach — NerdWallet Education
- The Employee’s Guide to IPO Tax Planning: How to Manage Your ‘Enormous Income Year’ — NerdWallet Education
- 1976 Called. It Can’t Believe What a House Costs Now — NerdWallet Education