The Department of Education has excluded nursing as a 'professional degree' program as it implements various changes to student loans.
The Department of Education has excluded nursing as a “professional degree” program as it sets about implementing various measures regarding student loans laid out in President Donald Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill.
’ The move has sparked significant uproar among nurses and nursing groups, with the American Nurses Association saying, as reported by Nursing World, that “limiting nurses’ access to funding for graduate education threatens the very foundation of patient care.” Newsweek has contacted the Department of Education via email for comment. Why It Matters The change will impact hundreds of thousands of students – there are over 260,000 students currently enrolled in entry-level Bachelor of Science in Nursing programs and around 42,000 students enrolled in Associate Degree in Nursing , according to data collected by the American Nurses Association. Many have warned the move will lead to a significant drop in the number of nurses in the country, impacting healthcare services nationwide. File photo: a nurse working in a clinic. What To Know In the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ the Grad PLUS program, designed to help graduate and professional students cover educational expenses, is being eliminated, while Parent PLUS loans, student loans available for parents of dependent undergraduate student, are being capped. These measures were brought in with the intention of creating a “new and simplified” Repayment Assistance Plan – whereby annual loans for new borrowers were capped at $20,500 for graduate students and $50,000 for professional students. As part of this implementation process, the Department of Education decided to change the definition of what counted as a professional program, and therefore eligible for the $200,000 aggregate limit available for professional students. The department determined that the following programs were professional: medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, optometry, law, veterinary medicine, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology and clinical psychology. This meant that physician assistants, nurse practitioners, physical therapists and audiologist were excluded from the list. One nurse posted through the IVs By The Seas TikTok account, a clinic offering mobile IV hydration and aesthetic services in New Jersey: “10 years of schooling… $210k in student loan debt… 15 years of ER and Trauma experience which included preventing physicians from making error at 3 a.m. and now… my degree isn’t considered a professional degree. Cool.” She also said that the country would be “short by a million other nurses” by not providing nurses with the same reimbursement on their education and training as other medical professions. “With a cap on federal student loans, fewer nurses will be able to afford graduate nursing education, such as Master’s, , and Ph.D. degrees,” Olga Yakusheva, a professor of nursing and business of health at Johns Hopkins University, told Newsweek. She added that these degrees allowed nurses career pathways to “organizational leadership, ability to diagnose and prescribe medications, training to lead independent research, and credentials to teach at institutions of higher education.” She said that this in turn would impact the capacity of the U.S. nursing programs and “reduce the numbers of new nurse graduates at the baccalaureate and associate degree levels.” What People Are Saying Patricia Pittman, a professor of health policy and management and director of the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University, told Newsweek: “There is no question that this is a gut punch for nursing. It is unconscionable that in a period when government should be focused on finding ways to retain licensed nurses in the field, the cap on loans represents a major barrier to continued education. Education, including from to ADN to BSN, and then beyond to become an advanced practice nurse, is the single best way to retain nurses, especially in rural and underserved communities. At a symbolic level, it is also deeply insulting to nurses who have fought so hard to be recognized for their critical contributions to healthcare.” Olga Yakusheva, a professor of nursing and business of health at Johns Hopkins University, told Newsweek: “The broader impact will be increased shortages of primary care, especially in areas with significant physician shortages. This could mean longer wait times and less time with your medical provider; as well as higher workloads for physicians. The strain on the educational system can lead to long-term reductions in the domestically educated nursing workforce, increasing labor costs and a grow...
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