‘Those are the people who keep you alive:’ Nurses push back after Trump admin excludes them from ‘professional’ status
During her 30-plus years working as a registered ICU nurse in a bustling New York City hospital, Nancy Hagans has seen it all.
“I could take care of somebody with a gunshot wound,” Hagans, who works in a Category 1 trauma center in Brooklyn, told The Independent. “I could take care of someone who had a hemorrhagic bleed in the brain. It could be someone who had an aortic rupture. It’s a very high-level skill. It’s a challenge.”
So when the U.S. Department of Education quietly proposed capping federal loans for graduate nursing students, leaving nursing off the list of professional degrees deemed eligible to apply for the highest debt limits, Hagans was furious.
“It’s an insult to nurses,” said Hagans. “Nurses are the backbone…nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, and midwives are a lifeline.
“Those are the people who keep you alive.”
Under cuts to student loans laid out in President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” those pursuing graduate degrees in nursing are limited to borrowing a maximum of $100,000 overall and up to $20,500 per year. Critics argue that it no longer covers the full cost of some advanced programs in the field.
In addition, almost half of graduate students go to school on part-time status, as many hold down jobs alongside their studies, which in turn limits the amount of federal loans they can receive.
Initially, the outrage was around the notion that the Department of Education no longer viewed nursing as a “professional degree.” In response, the DOE cried “fake news” and said the designation was “not a value judgement.”
But critics say semantics do matter, and excluding nursing from the list of professional degrees will make it much harder for students pursuing advanced degrees to pay for their studies.
And there has been bipartisan backlash to the proposal. Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia, a nurse practitioner, was one of the 140 lawmakers to sign a letter urging Education Secretary Linda McMahon to reconsider.
“As one of only two nurse practitioners in Congress and as someone who has led on nursing issues throughout my entire political career, I find it personally and professionally difficult to understand why the Department of Education is excluding nurses from being able to obtain the student loan funds they need to get an advanced nursing degree,” Kiggans said.
In response, the DOE claims its data “indicates that 95 percent of nursing students borrow below the annual loan limit and therefore are not affected by the new caps.”
Hagans, president of the New York State Nurses Association, an affiliate of National Nurses United, was on the picket line this week, standing beside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and rallying with colleagues to demand safer working conditions and fair wages.
The work can be dangerous and nursing unions want management to take action on workplace violence, among other demands. Last week, the NYPD was called to NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital after a man wielding a bloodied sharp object barricaded himself in a room with two others.
