The Department of Education has redefined what they are accepting as a professional degree causing the reclassification of several degrees, including nursing and teaching. This affects the federal student loan limits as the newly defined graduate programs fall under a lower loan cap compared to the professional degrees.
The change was brought on by the One Big Beautiful Bill act, where high-cost programs got a loan cap increase of $200,000 for all four years. The full list of official professional degrees is medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, law, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology and clinical psychology. The lower cost program’s loan cap decreased to $100,000, including nursing, physician assistants, physical therapy, audiology, accounting, education, social work, architecture and speech pathology.
Sophomore Evelyn Bloom said, “I think it’s helpful for the students who will get more loan money because those degrees tend to be more expensive, so I think they could really benefit. I also think it could be bad for the students who are getting their loan cap cut in half because their degrees are still pretty expensive.”
This will not mean that programs that were moved down aren’t considered professional though. The term ‘professional degree’ is just an internal definition by the department to categorize the difference in loan caps for the respective programs and does not reflect the actual value of the programs.
The decision was made because the department’s data indicated that 95% of nursing students didn’t take out the full $200,000 loan limit for graduate classes.
The grad PLUS (Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students) loans were also removed, which offered undergrad students loans with low interest rates and more protections. On its own, this could severely affect families who may rely on the loans to cover the full cost of tuition, but the goal of dropping the loan cap is to hopefully push schools to drop their program cost so that students aren’t overly burdened. More information on this can be found at npr.com.
Even though the changes won’t take place until July 2026, several colleges are already preparing for the changes, such as reviewing tuition structures, working on improving financial aid counseling and keeping their students and staff informed.
