Will students be shut out of pricier grad programs?
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Starting July 1, a cap on federal student loan borrowing limits kicks in. Graduate students will soon only be able to take out $20,500 a year, and up to $100,000 in total; the cap is higher for some professional programs, like medicine or law. But all this could mean new barriers to advanced degrees for students with little or no credit. Plus, we look at the ever-shrinking consumer cushion. And, what happened to talks of a proposed Spirit bailout?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Storms, floods, and fires are ever more extreme. |
| 0:04.2 | And yet, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is fighting for its life. |
| 0:08.5 | I've never been a big fan of FEMA. |
| 0:10.0 | FEMA's a disaster. |
| 0:11.1 | FEMA's a dirty way. |
| 0:11.9 | People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps. |
| 0:14.8 | Can the agency survive the stories that have been told about it? |
| 0:18.2 | And can we survive without FEMA? |
| 0:20.6 | American Emergency, the Movement to Kill FEMA, is a brand new series from WNYC's On the Media. |
| 0:27.2 | Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:31.1 | The ever-shrinking consumer cushion. |
| 0:35.3 | From Marketplace, I'm Sabrina Bennisier in New York. |
| 0:38.2 | We know the size of the U.S. economy grew faster in the first quarter this year. |
| 0:43.9 | Meanwhile, today, oil is at $110 a barrel, and gas is at $4.46 a gallon, on average. |
| 0:51.0 | So how much of our economic growth is just everyone paying more for energy? |
| 0:55.5 | Julia Cornato, is founder of macro policy perspectives and it's here to talk about it. Hi, Julia. |
| 1:00.1 | Good morning. |
| 1:01.1 | If we are spending more because gas prices are higher, because everything to do with energy |
| 1:06.1 | is higher, does that contribute to GDP growth? And is that like real GDP growth? And by real, I mean, |
| 1:13.7 | should we be thinking about it as actual growth if we're just spending more but not getting as |
| 1:18.4 | much for our money? Well, we can separate the impact of inflation and actual real gains in |
| 1:25.1 | spending. And we did see real gains in consumer spending in the first quarter. |
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