The Department of Education’s decision to exclude several professions from being considered professional degree programs, most notably nursing, has drawn outcry from nurses and nursing groups. The declassification, which restricts funding for students seeking graduate education, is a part of the department’s implementation of various student loan-related measures. Experts and nurse advocacy groups note that the industry is already suffering from a nursing shortage.
Why will nursing be excluded?
As part of the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the Grad PLUS program, which helped graduate and professional students secure funding for educational costs, is being eliminated. The bill also creates a new Repayment Assistance Plan, under which new annual loans for new borrowers are capped at $20,500 annually for graduate-level students and $50,000 a year for professional students. Once the new measures are implemented on July 1, 2026, students enrolled in professional degree programs will be restricted to a $200,000 lifetime cap, while non-professional students will be subject to a lifetime limit of $100,000.
To clarify who had access to that money, the Department of Education determined the following programs as professional: medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, optometry, law, veterinary medicine, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology and clinical psychology. Nurse practitioners, along with physician assistants, audiologists and physical therapists, were omitted from that list. The goal of the changes is to ensure that borrowers will not face “insurmountable debt to finance degrees that do not pay off,” said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent in a statement.
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What could this mean for the future of nursing?
The changes have prompted pushback from nursing professionals and organizations, who say the funding cut will negatively impact an already strained industry. The proposed cap on federal student loans is “undermining efforts to grow and sustain the nursing workforce,” the American Nurses Association (ANA) said in a press release.
Nurses are the “largest segment of the health care workforce and the backbone of our nation’s health system,” said Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, the president of the ANA. At a time when the country “faces a historic nurse shortage and rising demands,” limiting access to funding for graduate education “threatens the very foundation of patient care.” For many underserved communities across the country, “advanced practice registered nurses ensure access to essential, high-quality care that would otherwise be unavailable.”
This is a “gut punch for nursing,” said Patricia Pittman, a professor of health policy and management and director of the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University, to Newsweek. Education is the “single best way to retain nurses, especially in rural and underserved communities.” Symbolically, the move is also “deeply insulting to nurses who have fought so hard to be recognized for their critical contributions to health care.”
The reaction to the declassification is “fake news at its finest,” said Department of Education Press Secretary for Higher Education Ellen Keast to Newsweek. The department has had a “consistent definition of what constitutes a professional degree for decades,” and the “consensus-based language aligns with this historical precedent.” It is not surprising that “some institutions are crying wolf over regulations that never existed because their unlimited tuition ride on the taxpayer dime is over.”
