The Trump Administration’s Department of Education recently announced 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 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 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 per year. This comes at a time when college has grown increasingly out of reach 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 certain marginalized groups, 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 by women—are downgraded. Social work, a field disproportionately populated 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, medicine, dentistry, and engineering—the 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 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 era.
As the numbers of Black men and women sought to enter the legal profession, the rules of engagement began to change. 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 specifically to restrict entry. State bars were empowered to control admissions. “Character and fitness” reviews were added as a tool to deny Black applicants, based on racist assumptions and criteria such as criminal records or credit reports. Women were portrayed by board panels as too emotional or frail for legal practice and denied entry 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 as a so-called objective measure of readiness for law school. But the test has never been objective. Decades of research 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: Women’s scores historically lagged 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 on the test. Today, Black students are admitted at far lower rates, and students from low-income backgrounds score lower due to resource gaps. The same study 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, 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 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 has made clear that this practice of making graduate school less attainable should be employed to increase birth rates. 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.
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