The Trump administration’s targeted caps on graduate student borrowing, set to go into effect on July 1, are intended to encourage egregiously expensive graduate programs to lower their prices. But some organizations are warning that the changes will make things worse.
Nursing associations, in particular, have raised concerns. The American Nurses Association (ANA) is worried that the administration’s policy will “severely restrict access to critical loan support for post-baccalaureate nursing education and actively undermine efforts to expand and sustain the nursing workforce.”
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The ANA and other critics are misunderstanding the policy’s benefits, however. The caps on graduate student loans set borrowing limits based on whether a program is considered as a graduate or professional program. Borrowers entering graduate fields have an aggregate limit of $100,000 in student loans, while the cap is set at $200,000 for professional programs.
Only 11 fields received the “professional” designation, including law, medicine, and dentistry. Everything else, including nursing along with other fields like engineering and architecture, fell into the graduate program category.
The caps protect borrowers from unreasonably expensive programs. For instance, the median debt for advanced nursing programs at Georgetown University is more than $200,000. Most borrowers who pursue advanced nursing programs don’t accumulate nearly that much debt; the median debts in 115 of 140 programs fall below the administration’s new graduate borrowing cap. Schools with above-average debt should raise red flags.
Some institutions have been savvy and are already adapting to the expected limits—the cap’s intended purpose.
UC Irvine’s business school, for example, is cutting tuition for certain programs by up to 38 percent, a decrease of between $30,000 and $48,000. According to a May press release, the Flex MBA, at $99,000, now falls below the federal loan cap for graduate business degrees. Other MBA programs, such as those at Johns Hopkins and Purdue, are also slashing prices, in part because of pressure created by the cap.
Santa Clara’s law school announced last year that it would offer $16,000 tuition scholarships for law students entering in fall 2026 to ensure they have the funds they need in light of the new loan limits. St. John Fisher’s nursing school indicated in January that it was exploring scholarship opportunities with area employers to offset losses in federal loans. These initiatives show that universities can do more to reduce graduate program costs and are now motivated to do so.
To put these changes into perspective, universities are usually expected to increase their prices each year due to inflation. For the past several years, some froze their tuitions to help with college affordability. But it’s almost unheard of to see prices decline in higher education systematically. That’s a big deal. Critics are nitpicking around the edges and failing to understand how these policies could make graduate programs more reasonably priced in the future.
Students who struggle to access programs because of cost should blame the graduate programs that fail to adapt to the caps—not the Trump administration for trying to rein in costs.