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THE EQUITY DOCKET: THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXCLUSION  
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Terrance Sullivan
December 17, 2025
The Progressive
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_ The Education Department’s reclassification of ‘professional
degrees’ is the latest installment in a long history of excluding
Black people, women, and working-class people. _

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The Trump Administration’s Department of Education recently
announced
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that graduate programs for areas of study such as nursing, education,
social work, physical therapy, and more would no longer be considered
“professional degrees” for the purposes of federal student loan
limits. This seemingly innocuous change was presented as a routine
bureaucratic recalibration, a definition update aimed at urging
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universities to lower tuition costs.

But anyone who understands how access to education and mobility has
shaped the U.S. labor market can see this move for what it really is:
a reinstitution of the barriers that have kept Black people, women,
and working-class people from entering or advancing within certain
roles in the workforce for more than a century.

Under the rule, students in fields newly stripped of professional
degree status will face lower borrowing limits
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and tighter loan restrictions, meaning those in the areas not deemed
“professional” face a new loan cap of $20,500 per year for their
programs. In 2025, the average graduate program costs around $44,000
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This comes at a time when college has grown increasingly out of reach
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and cuts to available loans will be difficult for those without
alternative options to cover costs. The message is unmistakable: The
government still decides who is called professional, and that
definition still mirrors the hierarchy of privilege.

The Department of Education’s list of professional degrees currently
includes medical fields such as medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and
veterinary medicine, in addition to law and theology. But it now
excludes other crucial medical fields such as nursing, physical
therapy, dental hygiene, and occupational therapy, in addition to
social work, education, and other fields that train workers in
necessary social functions. 

There isn’t a clear, objective logic as to what fields ought to
belong to the professional degree category—like the point system on
_Whose Line is It Anyway?_, it is entirely made up. Professional
status is defined through legislation, accreditation committees, and
licensing boards that have historically excluded
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groups
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not because of lack of ability, but because of fear, resentment, and a
desire to hoard status.

This status change by Donald Trump’s Education Department follows
the same logic. Nursing and education—two fields that have
historically been dominated
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by women—are downgraded. Social work, a field disproportionately
populated
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by women and Black and Latinx professionals, is now deemed
nonprofessional as well. The department appears to be intent on
relegating racially diverse, community-rooted, and women-dominated
professions to a lesser status. 

Meanwhile, law
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medicine
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dentistry
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and engineering
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professions with the most access to federal loans and programs and the
highest degree of cultural prestige—are disproportionately domains
of white men, just as they were more than a century ago. Students in
these programs retain access to the highest federal loan caps,
allowing them to borrow more to pay rising tuitions. Under this new
proposal, however, classifying other programs as nonprofessional
further limits access to marginalized groups to access many
professions and adds arbitrary limits on who is allowed to enter the
workspace.

With its reclassification efforts, the Trump Administration has gladly
continued a long American tradition of professional gatekeeping
mechanisms being weaponized against those who are not white men. These
dynamics can be observed in multiple ways across the United States,
most notably in the licensure and accreditation bodies across many
fields. Take the bar exam, for instance—an arduous test that has
little to do with the actual profession and varies from state to state
for little reason. The exam is often described—at least by those who
haven’t taken it—as a neutral test of legal competence. Its
history tells a different story.

In the past, many state bars allowed for
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informal or apprenticeship-based bar admissions processes. Under this
system, Black people and women, though constrained by bias within the
profession, had some degree of pathway into practicing law. This was
especially true during the Reconstruction
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era.

As the numbers of Black men and women sought to enter the legal
profession, the rules of engagement began to change
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When formerly enslaved Black men began to study law and gain admission
to Southern courts, white bar associations panicked. The response was
swift and coordinated: Formal written bar exams were created
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specifically to restrict entry. State bars
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were empowered to control admissions. “Character and fitness”
reviews were added as a tool to deny Black applicants, based on racist
assumptions and criteria
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such as criminal records or credit reports. Women were portrayed by
board panels as too emotional or frail for legal practice and denied
entry
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through both statute and custom.

Put plainly, the bar exam, which is now treated as the gold standard
of professional entry, was designed not to ensure rigor and quality,
but to be a barrier—not against those who lacked professional
competency, but against Black people and women in a profession of
which white men feared losing control.

As law schools became formalized in the late 1970s and 1980s, the
modern LSAT emerged [[link removed]] as a
so-called objective measure of readiness for law school. But the test
has never been objective. Decades of research
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show racial and socioeconomic gaps baked into its structure, mirroring
disparities in wealth, schooling, and access to preparation resources.

Yet the test is still used by law schools as a factor of admission,
with devastating consequences
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historically lagged [[link removed]] due
to gendered design with biased and sometimes offensive questions. The
Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) who administers the test claims
they tried to rectify the gender and racially biased questions in the
late 1980s, but gender gaps still exist
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on the test. Today, Black students are admitted at far lower rates,
and students from low-income backgrounds score lower
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due to resource gaps. The same study
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that determined persistent gender and racial bias found that blind
admissions based on grade point average would result in more women and
Black students being admitted. 

Throughout U.S. history, the same pattern of exclusion recurs.
Marginalized groups work hard to move toward opportunity, and new
barriers are constructed to push them back. The proverbial American
Dream is less attainable if you are part of these groups, no matter
how hard you try. The GI Bill,
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for example, was enacted in 1944 to reward military veterans for their
service by  offering government-funded guaranteed housing loans, free
college, and a year of unemployment. But due to discriminatory
practices such as redlining, Black veterans were unable
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to take advantage of the benefits to the same extent as their white
male counterparts.

Keeping in the spirit of limiting upward mobility for some, overall,
access to what will remain as professional degrees is limited not only
by access to finances, but systemic barriers put in place to keep
those roles for white men. The very professions that did remain
accessible are now being categorized as not professional and access to
those programs will be drastically limited. Some will argue that the
Department of Education’s new professional degree status
categorization is not discriminatory and is merely a change in
definition. But definitions are political, and so are federal student
loan limits.

The impact of this change in professional status is entirely
predictable. Under these new rules some people, be it Black people 
or women will have to decide if entering these roles in the workforce
is possible. For many, the cost to attend will be too high and they
may opt for a career requiring less education or leave the workforce
entirely. The conservative blueprint Project 2025
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has made clear that this practice of making graduate school less
attainable should be employed to increase birth rates
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The misogynistic hope is that women will lose access to the graduate
credentials that fuel their professional mobility and instead opt to
raise a family. As a byproduct of this same change in professional
designation, Black students in health and service professions will
face higher financial barriers; wealthy students will fall back on
family resources; and entire communities will lose providers,
educators, and leaders.

Every generation in the United States has faced a redesigned version
of the same fight: the struggle to be recognized as fully capable,
fully professional, fully deserving. The system has always tried to
move the goal posts for Black people, for women, and for anyone who
threatens inherited privilege and power.

This new rule is not simply about student loans. It is about who gets
to enter which professions, who becomes a leader, who builds wealth,
who cares for communities, who accumulates power, and who is
systematically denied all of the above. Naming this pattern is the
first step in breaking it. The next step is refusing to let
definitions determine destiny.

 

_Terrance Sullivan is a racial justice law and policy professional. He
serves as the Vice Chair for Jefferson County Public Schools Advisory
Council for Racial Equity and is the former executive director of the
Kentucky Commission on Human Rights._

 

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
nonviolence and freedom of speech._

_Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we publish on national politics,
culture, and events including U.S. foreign policy; we also focus on
issues of particular importance to the heartland. Two flagship
projects of The Progressive include __Public School Shakedown_
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efforts to resist the privatization of public education, and __The
Progressive Media Project_ [[link removed]]_, aiming to
diversify our nation’s op-ed pages. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization. _

* Racial Inequity
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* gender inequality
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* Professional degrees
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* nursing
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* medical profession
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* legal profession
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* Department of Education
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* Trump Administration
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* Project 2025
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