December 14, 2025, 5:03 am ET
While many Americans see exclusion from the Department of Education’s (ED) list of “professional” graduate degrees as a loss of status and access to higher education, others see it as an opportunity to finally get ballooning student loan debt under control.
The Trump administration last month updated which majors fall under its definition of “professional” degrees that are eligible for higher student loan limits. Only eleven made the cut, and many were quick to point out degrees such as nursing, accounting, architecture, and physical therapy were excluded.
Critics said the proposed guidelines, which must go through a comment period before becoming finalized early next year, would prevent people from being able to afford pursuing the excluded professions.
But some lenders say the lower limits, coupled with ED eliminating unlimited Graduate PLUS loans for the cost of attendance and lowering the cap for Parent PLUS loans, may end up helping reduce student debt for many borrowers. Debt will drop if students must give more consideration to their budgets and degree costs and enrollments drop at expensive schools. Expensive schools may have to find ways to cut their prices to compete, they say.
The idea is rooted in the Bennet hypothesis. In 1987, former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, suggested that increased federal student aid enables colleges to raise tuition prices because subsidies will cover the cost for students.
So, as hurtful as it may be to hear your degree isn’t considered “professional,” some experts said it’s less about the status of your career than it is how much you can borrow from the federal government.
And most students studying in excluded professions don’t currently borrow at the higher limits, said Jack Wallace, director at private student loan provider Yrefy.
Which degrees qualify as professional?
If finalized, effective July 1,”professional” degrees that will have federal student loan limits of $50,000 annually and $200,000 lifetime include:
- Medicine
- Pharmacy
- Dentistry
- Optometry
- Law
- Veterinary medicine
- Osteopathic medicine
- Podiatry
- Chiropractic
- Theology
- Clinical psychology
Degrees not included on the list would have loan limits of $20,500 annually and $100,000 lifetime.
What’s the ‘professional’ change about?
Professional associations like the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy and American Association of Colleges of Nursing objected to ED’s saying their jobs aren’t professional.
“Classifying accountants as anything other than professionals fundamentally misrepresents the critical work (certified public accountants) perform, work that is responsible for the integrity of the global financial systems on which businesses and individuals rely,” said NASBA President and chief executive Daniel J. Dustin.
Professional associations and some congressional members have also worried that lower loan limits for those degrees will deter students from entering these fields.
The classifications will “undermine the ability of nurses, physical and occupational therapists, social workers, public health workers, mental health counselors, and other essential healthcare professionals to finance their education,” wrote Timothy Kennedy (D-New York) in a letter to the Department of Education, also signed by 69 of his colleagues in Congress, opposing the exclusions. The move “deepens existing workforce shortages, and further strains a healthcare system already in crisis.”
Some experts agree that loan limits will make people who can’t cover the costs of a certain program consider less expensive options or explore private loans that can offer lower fees and rates.
But many students pursuing graduate degrees deemed “non-professional” typically borrow below the annual loan limit so they might not be deterred by the loan caps, statistics show.
For instance, 95% of nursing students didn’t reach the $100,000 cap, ED said. Seventy-two percent of students pursuing a Master of Social Work (MSW) also borrow less than the $20,500 standard annual limit for graduate programs, and 84% of doctorates of education (Ed.D.) students borrow within the standard limit, said Preston Cooper, senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank.
That contrasts with only 31% of medical students who borrow less than the standard graduate loan limit of $20,500 annually, he said.
“I’m skeptical that loan limits will significantly impact enrollment in professions such as nursing, where the majority of graduate students currently borrow below the new limits and there are high wages for program graduates,” said Katharine Meyer, fellow at center-left leaning think tank Brookings.
But “that doesn’t mean there won’t be any impact,” Meyer said. “Definitely some people will decide not to be nurses because the program they were interested in costs more and they’re not able to move to a different part of the country to enroll in a lower-cost program” or lower-cost schools may not be able to expand admissions.
The proposed changes could have other negative consequences. “My biggest concern is actually for students enrolled in programs that did make the professional list, but the higher limits for professional programs still aren’t enough to make up for the elimination of PLUS loans,” Meyer said. “It’s far more likely that an aspiring dentist is not going to have access to enough federal loans for their program costs” despite being on the professional list.
How will the changed classifications keep student debt down?
Strict categorizations and loan caps could force schools to keep costs down, some experts said.
Costs “skyrocket because schools can charge whatever they want since kids can borrow what they want,” Wallace said.
General inflation over the past 45 years has mostly fluctuated between 2% and 4%, but tuition inflation averages between 7% and 8% annually. The Higher Education Price Index shows that while general consumer prices have roughly doubled since the 1980s, tuition has more than tripled.
“We created an education bubble like the mortgage crisis,” sad Dan Rubin, chief executive of YELO Funding that provides school loans. “After four to five decades of easy credit, easy money, lending as much as people need or want for education.”
Higher education in the U.S. costs the most among all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, data show.
“Other countries educate people for less,” Rubin said. “It’s about price, not how much you can borrow. We have to revise the cost of education.”
Schools may have to reconsider their prices if fewer people can afford them, they said.
However, some argued federal loan limits alone may not reduce tuition prices because many factors determine the costs.
“Changes in state funding are a significant factor in explaining rising costs,” said the centrist Bipartisan Policy Center. Some researchers estimated cuts in state spending account for about 41% of increased tuition revenue since the Great Recession that began in 2007, it said.
Schools also could shift costs between programs to maintain revenue, Meyer said.
“Some high-cost programs will try and bring costs down,” she said. “But at the same time, they may increase tuition costs in other graduate programs that have historically been lower priced in order to offset revenue loss.”
In a simplified example, a school’s nursing program costs less than the loan limit but a medical doctor program costs more. The school could lower the medical degree price to the loan limit and make up the revenue by raising the nursing degree to its loan limit.
Wallace and Rubin said they hope schools will choose to lower costs by returning to basics and just focusing on teaching.
“When I visited colleges, I was furious of where money was spent,” said Rubin, whose three children pursued higher education. “The facilities were beautiful, like a 5-star hotel – why? We’re here to get an education. It’s not a resort. It’s a college.”
With no limits on federal borrowing for graduate programs, schools had no incentive to reduce costs, he said. But now, “finally, I feel hopeful for the future.”
Medora Lee is a money, markets and personal finance reporter at USA TODAY. You can reach her at mjlee@usatoday.com and subscribe to our free Daily Money newsletter for personal finance tips and business news every Monday through Friday morning.
