Opposition toward new student-loan limits in President Donald Trump’s repayment overhaul is mounting.
On Friday, a bipartisan group of over 140 lawmakers sent a letter to Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent urging him to revise the Department of Education’s proposal to place new student-loan limits on professional degree programs.
The department recently concluded its negotiations on the student-loan payment changes that Trump signed into law in his “big beautiful” spending legislation. The changes included borrowing caps for graduate and professional students: a $100,000 lifetime limit for graduate students, and a $200,000 lifetime limit for professional students.
The crux of the debate centered on which programs qualify as “professional,” and the department identified 10 programs, including medicine, dentistry, and law, that would meet its new definition. Post-graduate nursing programs are not included within the professional definition, and the lawmakers wrote that the omission could exacerbate the ongoing nursing shortage.
“Classifying these programs as graduate programs would result in these students having to take out additional student loans to cover the remainder of their tuition, which will limit the ability for students to complete their advanced degree,” the letter said.
The lawmakers used the example of the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist program, which can cost over $200,000. They said that the proposed $100,000 cap is “restricting the pipeline of CRNAs and further limiting an anesthesia workforce that is suffering from shortages across all provider types.”
Ellen Keast, the department’s press secretary for education, said in a statement that “misinformation on TikTok has caused confusion” about the proposed student-loan limits. Keast cited data from the Department of Education showing that 95% of nursing students are borrowing within the student-loan limits.
“As for the most expensive outlying 5%, enrolled students are grandfathered into current lending limits to ensure there are no barriers to completion,” Keast said. “We expect that institutions charging tuition rates well above market prices will consider lowering tuition thanks to these historic reforms.”
Business Insider previously reported that, based on data from the College Scorecard, most advanced nursing programs would not be affected by the proposed caps. However, advocates still expressed concern about their implications. Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, told Business Insider that removing the professional designation for nurses could make it difficult to recruit and retain staff in the industry.
“It’s going to be a really bad revolving issue where we don’t have enough faculty to produce enough nurses to replace the nurses who are retiring,” she said.
The Department of Education is planning to implement these changes beginning in July of 2026, and its proposal is still subject to change based on the comments it receives from the public early next year.
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