The Trump administration has decided that, for student loan programs at least, nursing programs are not “professional” degrees. While the decision simply means nursing students will be subject to a lower federal student loan borrowing cap, nursing organizations have reacted with horror, viewing it as an all-out assault on the nursing profession.
“At a time when healthcare in our country faces a historic nurse shortage and rising demands, limiting nurses’ access to funding for graduate education threatens the very foundation of patient care,” Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, said in a statement last month. “We urge the Department of Education to recognize nursing as the essential profession it is and ensure access to loan programs that make advanced nursing education possible.”
However, the truth is much less outrageous. As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress eliminated the Grad PLUS student loan program, which had previously allowed graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attending the program of their choice—in essence, allowing students to use the government as an endless funding supply. Over the nearly 20 years it was in place, the Grad PLUS program helped create a massive increase in graduate borrowing.
When Congress eliminated the Grad PLUS program, it replaced it with a new program that allows those in most graduate school programs to take out up to $100,000 in federal loans, with those in professional degree programs permitted to take on up to $200,000. Because the law was relatively vague about what constituted a professional degree for student loan purposes, a rulemaking committee settled on 11 programs, including medical, veterinary, dental, law, and clinical psychology degrees, for the higher loan cap.
“Classifying advanced nursing degrees as standard rather than professional is not a judgement on the profession’s inherent worth,” Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last month. “There are many PhD programs, too, that are excluded from the professional loan limit—yet no one would argue that a professor with a PhD in economics is not a professional.” Cooper also pointed out that only advanced nursing degrees, like a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), could ever reasonably qualify as professional degrees under a sensible reading of the law.
Excluding nursing degrees from a “professional” student loan designation isn’t a sign of the Trump administration’s war on nurses; it’s simply recognizing the fact that the vast majority of advanced nursing programs do not charge the exorbitant fees that are common in medical schools, law schools, and dentistry training programs. And, further, exclusion is probably a good thing for prospective nursing students, since the few schools that currently charge beyond the federal limit will be pushed to lower their prices.
Statements like Kennedy’s assume that graduate school tuition is essentially a fixed fact. Attempts to curb students’ ability to take on six-figure federal student loan debts are read as pushing poor students out of school, rather than pushing schools to lower their prices.
While derided as making graduate school less accessible, there’s already some early evidence that federal student loan caps are pushing schools to lower prices. In September, Santa Clara School of Law announced that it was effectively cutting tuition by $16,000, explicitly “to offset the impact of recent repeal of the Graduate Plus federal-loan program.” Caps on student borrowing mean that schools can no longer use the federal government as a bottomless piggy bank, with students suffering the consequences.
