Lawmakers Push Back on Education Department’s Exclusion of Nursing from ‘Professional’ Graduate Loan Benefits

Amid a growing uproar, more than 140 bipartisan members of Congress have challenged the Trump administration’s Education Department for excluding nursing from its list of “professional” graduate programs eligible for expanded federal loan limits. This exclusion threatens to put advanced nursing degrees—and by extension, America’s healthcare resilience—out of reach for many aspiring nurses. The administration’s strict definition allows only students in fields like medicine, law, and theology to borrow up to $200,000 across their graduate studies, while capping other disciplines at just $100,000 total. Nursing graduate students, who frequently pursue costly but essential programs such as nurse anesthesia or nurse...