Democratic and Republican lawmakers agree: nurses deserve to take out more student loans.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley and Republican Sen. Roger Wicker led a bipartisan bill to include nursing degrees in the Department of Education’s professional degree designation.
The legislation addresses President Donald Trump’s new borrowing limits, which take effect July 1 and include a $100,000 lifetime limit for graduate students and a $200,000 limit for professional students. The Department of Education’s list of programs that meet the definition of “professional” includes medicine, law, and dentistry, but excludes advanced nursing degrees.
The exclusion concerned borrowers, advocates, and lawmakers across the aisle, who said nursing tuition can exceed the cap and would leave students unable to attend. The new bill would add advanced nursing programs to the Department of Education’s list.
“Nurses save lives, one bedside at a time. We should be doing everything we can to make it easier to recruit the next generation of these heroes, not make it harder,” Merkley said in a statement. “Republicans and Democrats alike have sounded the alarm over changes that make student loans for nurses more expensive, which threaten the future of the nursing workforce.”
A bipartisan companion bill was also introduced in the House.
In a House hearing last week, Education Sec. Linda McMahon said that nurses “are incredibly respected” and that most would not be affected by the borrowing caps.
“We looked very, very carefully at the entire nursing profession. 95% of the nurses that are in programs do not exceed these caps. 78% of the nurses that are moving for graduate programs do not exceed or come up to these caps,” McMahon said. “We were very carefully looking at the cost of these programs across the country. There are outliers.”
Most students in post-graduate nursing programs borrow within the new caps, according to an analysis of Education Department data from the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. In 115 out of 140 advanced nursing programs, students borrowed less than $100,000, it said.
Still, lawmakers and advocates said the caps could exacerbate an ongoing shortage of healthcare workers. In December, a bipartisan group of more than 140 lawmakers urged the department to revise its professional degree definition. They referred to the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist program, which can cost over $200,000, and said that the proposed $100,000 cap is “restricting the pipeline of CRNAs and further limiting an anesthesia workforce that is suffering from shortages across all provider types.”
Thousands of people pushed to change the definition of a professional degree during the rule’s public comment period in February.
“Policies that make graduate nursing education less affordable will not only discourage nurses from advancing their education but will also reduce the number of nurse educators available to train the next generation of nurses,” one commenter said. “Fewer educators mean fewer nursing school slots and longer delays in bringing new nurses into the workforce, and ultimately compromising care.”
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