Nursing has been excluded as a “professional degree” by the Trump administration in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
The Department of Education has made changes to what is considered a professional degree for student loans.
Female-dominated programs such as nursing, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physical therapists and audiologists are excluded from the list of professional degrees.
The Trump administration considers the following male-dominated programs to be professional degrees: medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, optometry, law, veterinary medicine, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology and clinical psychology.
Those programs are eligible for the $200,000 aggregate limit available for professional students.
The change means nursing students will no longer have access to the $200,000 limit for graduate education.
The change sparked an uproar among nurses and nursing groups such as the American Nurses Association. The group said the change “threatens the very foundation of patient care.”.
One registered nurse posted on the IVs By The Seas TikTok account: “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 immediately… my degree isn’t considered a professional degree. Cool.”
“With a cap on federal student loans, fewer nurses will be able to afford graduate nursing education, such as Master’s, [Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP)], and Ph.D. degrees,” Olga Yakusheva, a professor of nursing and business of health at Johns Hopkins University, told Newsweek.
Others worry that the move will effect the nursing shortage in America, as students consider degree programs that are considered professional.
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