Tristin Henson
Connector Staff
There is a new list of “professional” and “unprofessional” degrees from Trump and his administration, which is in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that was signed into law on July 4, 2025. Recently there has been a buzz among students, especially undergraduate seniors and current graduate students who will be most impacted by this new law. The new law eliminates the Grad PLUS loan program, which has helped many graduate students pursue careers in highly intensive, costly fields.
This new list comes from the Higher Education Act of 1965 that, when providing examples of what a professional degree are considered, states “Examples of a professional degree include but are not limited to Pharmacy (Pharm.D.), Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.), Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.), Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.), Law (L.L.B. or J.D.), Medicine (M.D.), Optometry (O.D.), Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.), Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.), and Theology (M.Div., or M.H.L.).”
Graduate students who are pursuing only these degrees are able to now borrow up to $50,000 per year ($200,000 overall), while graduate students who have a degree not on this list can only borrow $20,500 per year ($100,000 overall). This means that a large number of graduate degrees will not be considered “professional” and thus will not get the same amount of loans, including nursing, physician assistants, physical therapists, audiologists, architects, accountants, educators, social workers, and recently reported engineering, business master’s, counseling or therapy, and speech pathology according to Newsweek.
This reduction in aid will go into effect on July 1, 2026.
When asked about how she views her future, Tenderness Onyekwere, a junior undergraduate nursing student here at UMass Lowell, said: obviously, I wanna get my NP [Nurse Practitioner degree] in the future, but I know that’s a big financial commitment, and now I don’t know if I can afford that… If I do family medicine, I’m stuck doing family medicine for the rest of my life unless I wanna pay for another NP…If I’m doing something, I’m stuck doing this.”
Ultimately, she said it’s a good question for after graduation, but that “some people are doing the 4+1s; I feel like that will affect them a lot more.”
This will impact a vast majority of graduate students and cut off access to higher education for those who cannot meet that loan cap. Thus, this will also, of course, greatly impact UMass graduate students here in Massachusetts, as public college costs are usually cheaper than private college costs.
UMass Lowell itself was ranked and has publicly promoted that it is the No. 1 public university in Massachusetts by the Wall Street Journal, the No. 1 best value public university in the state according to both WSJ and U.S. News & World Report and No. 1 for social mobility among all universities in Massachusetts.
Obviously, all graduate students will be heavily affected, but many people have raised concerns specifically about nursing, which UMass Lowell is well-known for as one of its top majors, as this will heavily affect our declining healthcare system.
Onyekwere commented on this by saying, “this is gonna destabilize the already messed-up healthcare system in the US.”
When asked about how she sees UMass Lowell fit into this specifically, Onyekwere said that “Lowell’s a very good nursing program… UML is usually really good about loans… I feel like the nursing program itself is very forgiving. I know I didn’t pay my registration until last week, but they still made sure that they still had a placement for me if I could afford it.”
Of course, since the government has been so unreliable with education and loans, many people are now looking to universities and hospitals to potentially cover and support their nurses, doctors and staff.
Onyekwere said that it would be great if UMass Lowell “[made] that time to check in with [students], even if they have to take another gap year, or a semester off… and they can still come back to it when they get the money, if they get the money… Obviously, I can’t say give more scholarships, cause it’s not the solution to everything, but it could be nice… when [students] also work for a hospital, sometimes they’ll also pay for you to get your NP so you can become a good manager or something like that. So hopefully some awesome hospitals will be recommended, reminded and potentially pushed to incentivize people to get their degrees… If you’re having trouble finding people for high-level nurse management, just provide the resources for them, and someone will bite.”
