Senator Richard Blumenthal wants to send a “memo” to Education Secretary Linda McMahon:
“One of these days you will need a nurse,” he said at a press conference on Dec. 8. “You’d better treat that nurse with the respect they deserve and call it a profession and provide for loans so that nurses can afford the education and training that is necessary for them to serve all of us with the skill and expertise that we all deserve.”
In November, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) excluded graduate-level nursing degrees from its list of professional degree programs. This will limit federal student loans for nursing students.
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s (OBBBA) Repayment Assistance Plan, students who pursue professional degrees can borrow $50,000 per year from the federal government, with a maximum of $200,000. However, other graduate students can only borrow $20,500 a year and have a cap of $100,000.
Graduate-level nursing used to be considered a professional degree, alongside medicine, dentistry, and optometry, among other fields. But as of November, graduate degrees in nursing are no longer classified as “professional degrees.”
“Putting caps of $20,000 in student loans every year is going to deprive all of us of nurses we need to provide the health care we deserve,” Blumenthal said a press conference on Dec. 8. “There is just no other way to put it than to say this new policy is cruel and stupid, and it will affect people throughout the state of Connecticut.”
There is a nursing shortage across the country, and Connecticut is no exception. There are almost 89,800 registered nurses (RNs) in the state, and 14,400 licensed practitioner nurses (LPNs) in the state, but only half of them are working in the field.
The Connecticut Health Policy Project estimates that the state will be short around 500 nurse practitioners and 1,400 RNs by 2028.
CTData’s most recent report on nursing education found that student enrollment in baccalaureate and master’s programs increased in recent years, but there were still education gaps.
“Nobody can expect nurses to enroll in these programs when the resources aren’t available for them to afford going through them,” Blumenthal said.
There are multiple levels of nursing degrees that people can earn. Some of them, like Associate’s Degrees in Nursing (ADN), usually take around two years to complete, and students only need a high school degree to enroll in these programs. These programs are not impacted by the borrowing cap.
Other degrees, like master’s level courses, which will be impacted by the loan limit, usually require students to already have bachelor’s degrees and be RNs.
According to EduMed, students need to pay between $6,000 on the low end to over $100,000 on the high end to earn nursing degrees.
At Connecticut community colleges, students can earn an ADN and be eligible to become RNs in two years if they study full-time. Full-time tuition is less than $5,800 a year. In contrast, at Yale University, a Master’s of Science in Nursing takes two semesters to complete and costs almost $55,000.
According to the DOE, only 5% of nurses need to borrow more than $20,500 a year, or $100,000 to complete graduate programs.
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