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By Ms. Editors | In a quiet regulatory maneuver with seismic consequences, the U.S. Department of Education—under the direction of Republican members of Congress—has proposed reclassifying all graduate nursing degrees as “non-professional.” What sounds like an obscure bureaucratic shift is, in reality, a direct attack on the women who make up nearly the entire nursing workforce and who hold together America’s fraying healthcare system.
The change stems from a new, internal definition of “professional degrees” tied to borrowing limits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Medicine, dentistry, law, pharmacy, optometry and veterinary programs all make the cut. Graduate nursing does not. That includes nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, clinical nurse specialists, nurse anesthetists—the advanced practice roles that keep rural, poor and underserved communities alive.
Beginning July 1, 2026, nursing students would lose access to the higher federal loan caps reserved for “professional” programs and would be limited to the far lower graduate-loan ceiling of $20,500 per year, with a lifetime maximum of $100,000. By contrast, medicine, dentistry and law students—professional fields still dominated by men—would retain access to $50,000 per year and $200,000 total.
Gone would be the Grad PLUS program, which currently allows students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance, including housing and childcare.
Gone would be the financial backbone that makes graduate nursing possible for first-generation students, working mothers and women of color.
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