Two senators on Tuesday introduced a bipartisan bill to add nursing degrees to the Department of Education’s professional-degree designation, moving to blunt new federal student loan limits that take effect July 1.
Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said the change is needed because advanced nursing degrees are excluded from the department’s current list of professional programs, which includes medicine, law and dentistry. Under the new rules, graduate students face a $100,000 lifetime borrowing limit and professional students face a $200,000 cap.
Merkley said nurses “save lives, one bedside at a time” and argued that lawmakers should be making it easier to recruit the next generation rather than making it harder. He also said Republicans and Democrats alike have sounded the alarm over changes that make student loans for nurses more expensive and threaten the future of the nursing workforce.
The Senate measure has a bipartisan companion in the House, giving the effort a second path even as the clock runs toward July 1. That date is when President Donald Trump’s new borrowing limits are set to begin, and the department’s current definition leaves advanced nursing out of the category that receives the broader professional-school treatment.
The fight over the definition has been building for months. In December, more than 140 lawmakers urged the department to revise its professional-degree rule, pointing in part to the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist program. They said the proposed $100,000 cap is restricting the pipeline of CRNAs and further limiting an anesthesia workforce already suffering shortages across all provider types.
Public comments in February showed the issue had spread well beyond Capitol Hill. Thousands of people weighed in during the rule’s comment period, including one commenter who warned that policies making graduate nursing education less affordable would not only discourage nurses from advancing their education but also reduce the number of nurse educators available to train the next generation. Another commenter said fewer educators would mean fewer nursing school slots, longer delays in bringing new nurses into the workforce and, ultimately, compromised care.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon told lawmakers in a House hearing last week that nurses are “incredibly respected” and said the department had looked carefully at the profession before drawing the line. McMahon said 95% of nurses in programs do not exceed the caps and 78% of nurses moving into graduate programs do not exceed or even reach them.
But an analysis of Education Department data by the American Enterprise Institute found that in 115 out of 140 advanced nursing programs, students borrowed less than $100,000. That does not erase the political problem for the administration: the borrowing limits may still hit the programs that are most expensive, most specialized and most closely tied to the shortage lawmakers say is already squeezing the health system.
The outcome now hinges on whether the bipartisan push can move fast enough to matter before the limits take effect. If it cannot, advanced nursing programs will enter July under a definition that many lawmakers say treats them as less than professional, even as the country keeps asking them to produce more nurses.
