In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Education made a list of graduate programs it considered “professional degrees.” Some nurses were outraged to see nursing programs weren’t on the list.
The classification change came as part of a larger crackdown on federal graduate student loans baked into President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The loan limits will go into effect July 1.
Students from professional degree programs — including medicine, dentistry and law — will be able to take out $200,000 in federal loans. Nonprofessional graduate degrees, such as nursing, are limited to $100,000 in federal loans.
Bachelor of Science in Nursing programs won’t be affected by the loan limits.
The Department of Education defended its decision in a “Myth vs. Fact” press release, where it wrote the definition of professional degrees is an internal classification, not a “value judgement about the importance of programs.”
Now, nurses across the country are protesting what they view as a devaluing of their profession. The protest spread to the UF Health community, where the Florida Association of Nurse Practitioners leads the resistance.
Four members from FLANP held up signs reading “Don’t piss-off the nurses!” and “Devalue Nursing → Endanger Patients” at a protest Jan. 3 outside UF Health on Archer Road. The signs had the phrase “Nurses are watching” written on the bottom.
Rosemarie Latham, the FLANP government affairs chair, said the rally was meant to keep the classification of nursing degrees and the changes to loan limits in the news.
“The purpose is always to keep this in the forefront of people’s minds and knowledge,” Latham said. “A lot of times people don’t even think of or worry about something such as this until it affects them.”
UF Health and the UF College of Nursing did not respond to requests for comment for this story after multiple emails and phone calls over the course of two weeks.
The Department of Education said graduate nursing programs are expected to respond to the loan caps by lowering their program costs. That way, nurses won’t be left with more student loan debt than they can pay.
The new caps won’t affect 95% of nursing students, wrote Ellen Keast, the press secretary for higher education at the Department of Education, in an email statement to The Alligator Jan. 6. Most of them already borrow below the annual loan limit, the Department of Education said. The department also emphasized the change won’t affect bachelor’s or associate’s programs, saying eight in 10 nurses in the workforce don’t have a graduate degree.
Of the 1,500 nursing students enrolled at UF, 410 — or a little over one in four — are working on either advanced graduate or nursing doctorate degrees as of the Spring 2026 semester. Of those pursuing bachelor’s degrees, about 80% attend graduate school within three years of completing their BSN degrees, according to a Fall 2025 press release.
Under the new act, students who are already enrolled in graduate programs can continue under the current loan limits for up to three academic years.
Madeleine Chewning, the Region 2 director of FLANP and a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, said she’s disturbed by the proposed act.
“What I foresee happening is that it’s going to make grad school less accessible to people who are not elitists,” Chewning said.
Chewning said she thinks the loan limits will prevent members of the middle and lower classes from earning high-level degrees, which would then prevent them from moving to higher positions in their careers.
Clovis Monkhorst, a 20-year-old UF nursing junior, said she plans to attend graduate school to do psychiatric nursing. Monkhorst said she’s uncertain about how she will pay for it if her tuition is more than the loan limit.
Monkhorst still plans to attend graduate school, but it may be further into the future than she initially planned, she said. Depending on tuition costs, she might have to go to a less-desired school.
“From talking to a lot of the nursing students in my classes and stuff, almost every single person I’ve talked to wants to either go straight into CRNA school or a graduate-level program,” Monkhorst said. “I haven’t really talked to anyone that was maybe satisfied with just a bachelor’s.”
Contact Cameron Countryman at ccountryman@alligator.org. Follow her on X @cpcountryman.
