How the Loan Cap Committee Reached Consensus
Jessica Blake
November 10, 2025
Department officials are celebrating the new regulation as a step toward lowering college costs. Others argue it could lead to workforce shortages in critical health-care roles.
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.)
