New limits on federal student loans could dramatically reshape how the U.S. trains nurses and doctors.

Under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed earlier this year, future medical students would be capped at borrowing $50,000 per year, no more than $200,000 total.

The law also gives the Department of Education broad authority to decide which graduate degrees count as professional and therefore qualify for higher loan limits.

The Trump administration is now proposing a far stricter cap.

$20,500 a year for students pursuing graduate degrees in nursing, public health, or social work.

Fields the department says

no longer meet the definition of professional programs. Other disciplines, including education,

accounting, and architecture would also lose their professional designations. We're joined now by

Jennifer Mensick Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association. Thanks for being with us.

Thank you for having me. So what's your principal concern about how these new federal loan caps

would affect future nursing students? And beyond that, the delivery of medical care in the U.S.

It's going to have devastating effects. We know the average cost of attendance for nursing graduate students is over $30,000 a

year. And the fact that some individuals might say, well, maybe nursing school shouldn't cost that much,

that's fine. But we shouldn't limit the definition of what's considered a professional. Because

these have these policy implications have real-world negative impacts. It's like a professional because these have these policy implications have real world negative

impacts it's like a trojan horse we define it once in one area without nursing what's next

there's a lot of downhill consequences that could happen in so many other things besides just this

and this is on the heels of the big, beautiful bill,

taking out all of the Title VIII funding. So all the federal funding for nursing education was

removed. Now this, we're going to see increased wait times for primary care visits. We're going to

see people not having access to health care in the United States.

The administration says that nearly all nursing students fall under the proposed caps and therefore would see no impact. I would imagine you see it differently.

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