Nurses took the spotlight in a key student-loan repayment change.
The Department of Education has moved forward with President Donald Trump’s plan to overhaul student-loan repayment in his “big beautiful” spending legislation, including new caps on student-loan borrowing for graduate and professional students.
A big point of contention was a new definition for the programs that qualify as “professional” and allow students to borrow more under the caps. Ten programs, including law and medicine, meet the department’s professional designation and qualify for the higher $200,000 lifetime borrowing cap, while other programs, including nursing, are subject to the lower $100,000 cap.
The caps particularly angered the healthcare industry. During negotiations with the Department of Education on the proposed caps, some stakeholders argued that healthcare workers, such as nurses, might choose to leave the industry because they lack sufficient funding for their programs, thereby putting Americans who rely on healthcare services at risk. While data from the department showed that most advanced nursing programs would not be impacted by the caps, advocates still worry about the implications.
An analysis of data from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard found that most students in post-graduate nursing programs borrow within the new caps. Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a blog post that “the new caps will affect only a small number of programs charging exorbitant prices.” Cooper said 115 of the 140 advanced nursing programs had a median debt below $100,000, based on classes of 2019 and 2020 available data.
Only a handful of programs had debt loads of at least $180,000, well in excess of the new caps. Georgetown University’s advanced nursing degree had a median debt load of $212,494.
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Still, the new borrowing caps — coupled with Trump’s elimination of the Grad PLUS program, which allowed graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for their programs — could weigh on the healthcare industry.
The Association of American Medical Colleges found that the median cost for four years of public medical school in 2025 was $286,454, with about half of medical students taking out Grad PLUS loans. Education policy experts told Business Insider that it’s likely the caps could lead more students to forgo their advanced degrees or seek additional financing through the riskier private lending market.
The Department of Education said in a recent press release that 95% of nursing students borrow below the new caps, based on department data, and it emphasized that the limits do not impact undergraduate nursing programs. The department also said that changing the definition of a “professional” degree is “not a value judgement about the importance of programs.”
“It has no bearing on whether a program is professional in nature or not,” the department said.
The department’s changes to student-loan repayment, including the new borrowing caps, could still change. The public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposal early next year before the final rule is implemented in July 2026.
How the new borrowing caps could affect the medical worker shortage
Healthcare advocates said the caps could exacerbate the already-existing doctor and nurse shortage, especially alongside planned Medicaid changes: “It feels like we’re being attacked on all sides and really limiting what we can get from a funding perspective,” Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, told Business Insider.
Mensik Kennedy added that removing professional designations from nursing degrees could make it more difficult to train and retain faculty at nursing schools, a job that requires more advanced and expensive education. “It’s going to be a really bad revolving issue where we don’t have enough faculty to produce enough nurses to replace the nurses who are retiring,” she said. The trend will have an “immediate impact” on the number of nurses in the US healthcare system, which will shape patient care for years to come.
NerdWallet lending expert Kate Wood also said increased limitations on student loans could further disparities in the nursing field. She told Business Insider that “Healthcare professionals already skew whiter and wealthier than the general population” and loan caps “may push students from groups that have historically had limited access to higher education, like people from underrepresented minority groups, lower-income families or people in rural areas, away from these fields.”
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