11/26/2025
🚨In this Boston Globe column and other media stories over the last two days, MNA President Katie Murphy and members of the MNA Board of Directors have weighed in on the terrible decision by the Trump Administration to restrict student loan access to nurses, healthcare professionals and others seeking advanced degrees.🚨
Trump administration wants to downgrade the professional status of nursing graduate programs
By Renée Graham Globe Columnist, November 25, 2025
During my mother’s hospital stays in the last year of her life, I would arrive when visiting hours began and stay until they ended. Throughout those long days, a doctor never once entered her room.
But the nurses were never far away.
It was the nurses who did everything to take care of my mother. They even found time to offer me solace when I felt overwhelmed by what inevitably lay ahead.
Anyone who has spent time in a hospital, either as a patient or a visitor, knows that nurses are as professional as they are critical. But the Trump administration wants to change that.
In President Trump’s oxymoronically named “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a proposal for the Department of Education to strip nursing — and a host of other professions — of professional degree status.
That would limit how much graduate students in nursing could get in student loans and cut off access to loan forgiveness programs, raising fears that these changes could deter people from entering a field that’s already suffering shortages.
“This is a profession where people are not coming from wealth, and we need to be able to obtain loans to further our education,” Katie Murphy, president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, told me during an interview.
“People need to tap into loans, and I certainly used loans when I got my graduate degree at Framingham State,” Murphy said. “So this is really concerning.”
Starting next July, how much graduate students can get in federal loans could depend on a program’s professional degree status. Those in programs with the professional designation could borrow up to $50,000 per year with an overall limit of $200,000.
But for programs without professional degree status, graduate students would only be able to borrow about $20,500 annually, with a lifetime cap of $100,000.
Other health fields that could lose professional degree status include physical therapists, social workers, audiologists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants.
An Education Department press release on Monday said that officials had “not published a proposed or final rule defining professional student yet.”
In its own statement, the Massachusetts Nurses Association Board of Directors said that “reclassification is not a technical adjustment. Rather it is a direct attack on the healthcare workforce and the future of patient care.
“To arbitrarily strip professional status from nursing and healthcare professional degrees is an insult to every person who delivers lifesaving care and a blow to the healthcare system that depends on us,” the statement said.
Murphy, a critical care nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, has been in the profession for 50 years. She said that changes to loan access will harm not only nursing but patients as well.
“We’re trying to attract more and more people and we’re trying to attract a more diverse complement of people that are entering this profession,” Murphy said. She also mentioned that since patients have better health outcomes when they have a cultural bond with their health provider, “we need to have access to these federal loans.”
Nurses don’t just give patients pills and help them to the bathroom. Advanced practice nurses give reproductive care as nurse midwives. Some patients receive anesthesia from certified nurse anesthetists.
“These professionals provide our care. You can get your primary care from a nurse practitioner. All of my children’s deliveries were with nurse midwives,” Murphy said. “In underserved and rural communities, there’s a real lack of division, so advanced practice nurses are critical in providing primary care, reproductive care, and family practice. So much care can be delivered with people in advanced practice roles.”
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses and other health care workers were regularly cheered by strangers and hailed as heroes. By the end of 2020, about 62 percent of nurses reported experiencing burnout, according to an American Nurses Association survey. In five years, that number has barely budged. Now is not the time to dissuade a new generation of potential nurses.
On May 6, the White House commemorated National Nurses Day with a message that said that nurses “reflect the character of America and epitomize the inexhaustible capacity of the human spirit.”
If the Department of Education limits loan amounts for those who want to further their nursing education, that would reflect the character of an administration that always seems intent on hurting Americans instead of helping them.
An Education Department change could limit loan access for potential nursing grad students.
