Congress should fix the ‘Do No Harm’ rule before it does harm

The Department of Education’s new “Do No Harm” test has a name — and a premise — that conservatives should love. The logic goes that if graduates of a certificate or college program do not out-earn those with only a high-school diploma, then those programs have proven to be a bad investment, and Washington should stop enabling them through student loans.

After decades in which colleges raised prices and students were saddled with debt, some accountability is overdue. And for the MAGA base, anything that sticks it to educational institutions broadly painted as liberal, woke and elite will provoke cathartic glee.

The problem comes when one reads the department’s own projections, which show that college degree programs pass this test with flying colors, but many of the blue-collar short career programs that have minted generations of small business entrepreneurs — the kinds of people that the Trump administration claims to champion — do not.

The good news is that Congress can correct the issue with a single amendment, and it has until 2028 to do so.

To see how the test breaks down, consider just one entrepreneur whose career Secretary of Education Linda McMahon knows unusually well: Linda McMahon herself.

McMahon graduated from East Carolina University in 1969 with a degree in French and a teaching certificate. She worked as a paralegal to pay the bills while her husband learned the ropes in professional wrestling. It was the prelude to an entrepreneurial journey that would end with her family achieving the American Dream.

But four years after graduation — the point at which her department’s rule measures graduates’ earnings — there was little in McMahon’s paycheck to suggest an economic titan in the making. At one point she was on food stamps. In 1976, she and her husband filed for bankruptcy. But then in........

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