The Department of Education and its rule-making committee tasked with determining how to implement Congress’s latest loan caps reached consensus Thursday, but that doesn’t mean everyone involved was happy with the results—or that the policy proposal is guaranteed to be legally sound, some higher education experts say.
The key focus of the regulations, which should be published to the Federal Register by early next year, was to determine which degree programs should be eligible for which level of loans.
Under the higher ed section of Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed in July 2025 and takes effect in July 2026, students in graduate programs can borrow up to $100,000 from the federal government while borrowers in professional programs can take out twice as much in loans. At issue was the definition of professional programs. In the end, the department and negotiators on the committee agreed to recognize only 11 primary programs and a handful of other doctorate degrees as eligible for the $200,000 loan level. (All but one program on that list—clinical psychology—had been included in the original, most restrictive proposal that department officials first brought to the table in October.)
Programs Eligible for the Higher Loan Cap
- Medicine (M.D.)
- Pharmacy (Pharm.D.)
- Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.)
- Optometry (O.D.)
- Law (L.L.B. or J.D.)
- Veterinary medicine (D.V.M.)
- Osteopathic medicine (D.O.)
- Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P. or Pod.D.)
- Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.)
- Theology (M.Div. or M.H.L.)
- Clinical psychology (Psy.D. or Ph.D.)
While the Trump administration celebrated the committee’s consensus as a key to lowering college costs, the results left many outside industry leaders, higher education lobbyists and some committee members unsatisfied.
“Anytime an administration can reach consensus with negotiators on an issue or topic is always seen as a success for the administration. That’s not an easy feat,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education, a leading lobbying group that represents colleges and universities across the sector. “But building off of that, there are still areas of the language that were agreed to that are concerning for us.”
Specifically, Guillory and others worry that while the updated definition of professional programs includes clinical psychology, it excludes other high-demand health-care professions such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners, physical therapists and audiologists.
Some outside organizations, including ACE, urged the department to extend the higher loan cap for careers outside of health care, such as architecture, accounting, education and social work. But conversations at the negotiation table suggested that committee members were largely focused on advocating for medical professions.
In multiple instances, including in their own policy proposal, negotiators explained how they hoped to increase access for high-demand, high-return-on-investment careers while also upholding Congress’s intent to rein in student debt and lower college costs. Expanding the definition to include other health-care careers would do just that, they said.
That proposal was shot down. Instead, the department pushed for a more limited plan, describing it as a compromise, and pressured committee members to commit or risk losing “concessions” ED had made in other areas.
A Comparison of Proposals
ED’s First Proposal: Defined professional programs using an exhaustive list of 10 example programs cited in the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The Committee’s Proposal: Defined professional programs to include any program on the HEA list as well as clinical psychology and any program that required 80 credit hours and had the same two-digit identification code as one already on the list.
ED’s Final Proposal: Defined professional programs to include any program on the HEA list as well as clinical psychology and any program that required a doctoral degree, had the same four-digit identification code as one already on the list and required a license.
“They were afraid that if there was no consensus then those changes would not be included at all,” Guillory said. (The regulations won’t be finalized until after public comment but will likely mirror what the negotiating committee agreed upon.)
One source familiar with the negotiation process told Inside Higher Ed that they fear the department’s justification for adding only clinical psychology to the list leaves a big hole in any legal argument for defending the regulation. The department explained the addition using existing regulatory text from the Biden administration’s Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment Rule—a regulation the Trump administration has expressed interest in rewriting. From the source’s perspective, citing a policy the department will likely revamp is “not a strong legal argument.”
“It almost looks like the department went searching for a legal justification for their preferred policy solution,” they said.
Still, the Education Department applauded the final proposal as one “that will have a positive, lasting and meaningful impact on our higher education system.”
“When I spoke to you in October, I explained that we named this committee ‘RISE’ because we see this as an opportunity to rise out of a broken higher education system that has failed too many students for far too long,” Under Secretary Nicholas Kent said in his closing remarks Thursday. “I also asked you to consider how history will view this moment: Will they say that we simplified, empowered and made college more affordable, or that we preserved a broken and bloated system? It’s undeniable that you did the former.”
It Could Be ‘Far Worse’
Some college lobbying groups, higher ed policy analysts and committee members agreed that the rule-making outcome was reason to celebrate.
Jordan Wicker, senior vice president of legislative and regulatory affairs at Career Education Colleges and Universities, a lobbying group that represents for-profit institutions, said he was pleased with the consensus.
“Our negotiators for the proprietary sector, Andy Vaughn and Jeffrey Bodimer, played a key role in advocating for a more robust definition of a ‘professional degree,’” he said. (Vaughn was one of the loudest voices at the negotiating table when it came to ensuring clinical psychology and the few other mental health degree programs made the professional cut.)
Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, who attended the majority of the two-week negotiation process, said he thought the department had truly listened to what committee members, particularly those representing institutions, brought to the table.
“They took a lot of time and looked at a lot of details and dug through data to find a way—under the statute—to offer a more expansive view,” he said. But, at the same time, “schools had to keep in mind that if we didn’t get to consensus, the department would be free to do whatever it wanted to do, and could snap back, just as it did on the recent Public Service Loan Forgiveness rule, to what was originally proposed.”
“I think that would have been far worse for schools than what was negotiated Thursday,” Buchanan added.
Others Say It’s ‘Too Narrow’
But some critics argued that the department made the final proposal seem more expansive than it actually is.
Under the regulations that reached consensus, degrees will only qualify as professional if they are explicitly included in the original list of 10, are a Ph.D. or Psy.D. in clinical psychology, or if they have the same four-digit CIP code as the 11 approved and are a doctoral-level degree that leads to licensure. (A CIP code, otherwise known as the Classification of Instructional Programs, is part of an organizational system used by ED to group similar academic programs.)
In an effort to get committee members on board, department officials suggested that this proposal was significantly more expansive than the original list because it included 44 other degree programs within the same code. But multiple higher education experts told Inside Higher Ed this was misleading; once the other two criteria are applied—meaning the degree is doctoral level and requires licensure—they estimate that fewer than 10 programs will make the cut. (The department never explicitly stated how many passed the test.)
MacGregor Obergfell, director of government affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said he was “disappointed” with the language the committee agreed to.
“In our view,” he said, “it too narrowly defines what is a professional program, and in adopting that narrow definition, it’s going to leave thousands of students without the funding that they need for their education.”
What the department did disclose was data that showed how many more students would benefit from the higher loan cap under the final proposal compared to ED’s original proposal. That number fell somewhere between 13,000 and 40,000 additional students. By comparison, the data showed that a more inclusive plan proposed by a committee member earlier in the process would have expanded access to about 237,000 students.
“Once you’ve applied all those criteria [the need for licensure and a doctoral-level degree], it’s going to narrow the scope of the proposal pretty considerably,” said Clare McCann, a former Education Department official and now managing director of policy for the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center at American University. “The department seems to have made its best guess, but there’s not a great way to validate that externally at this point.”
But even if the final proposal is much less inclusive regarding professional loan limits, it is accompanied by big wins in other areas of the regulation that appeared to be at risk if committee members did not consent. They include allowing existing undergraduate borrowers to remain grandfathered into the Parent PLUS loan program even if they change majors, and prorating monthly payments for married borrowers who file their taxes jointly.
In his closing remarks before the vote, Under Secretary Kent reminded the committee members of the “concessions” his department made, saying they could all be reversed if consensus was not reached and the department got a chance to rewrite the proposal.
“It puts everything in jeopardy if we do not come to a consensus here,” he said. “Now, that is not to bully you into voting. You all will make the best decision that you believe is appropriate, but I do want to table set that all of the good things that you got for your stakeholder groups … we will reconsider those.”
Many higher education experts Inside Higher Ed spoke with recognized that this put the committee members in a difficult position.
But in the end, as Scott Goldschmidt, a partner at the law firm Thompson Coburn who focuses on higher ed, said, negotiators appeared “largely unwilling to risk losing the concessions already secured, especially given concerns about what the department might do if left free to return to its more restrictive starting point.”
Another member of the higher ed policy community put it this way.
“The process to seek consensus on one rules package, rather than consensus on individual provisions, was certainly a decision that ED made intentionally … Negotiators had to weigh provisions that might have been favorable to parts of their constituencies with other proposed rules that might not be as favorable,” he said. “What I would say is the negotiators had a tough job.”
