Earlier this year, the Trump Administration passed a new higher education budget as a part of the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’.
Now, the future of student loans and finances at Ferris is uncertain.
Signed into law in July 2025, several extended provisions are expected to take effect over the next year.
Focused on the extension of personal tax rates that Trump previously signed into law in 2017, the bill also contributed to significant cuts in Medicaid and expanded qualification requirements for SNAP benefits.
Among the provisions included were extensive changes to student loans.
Included in these changes are new caps for loan borrowing, now set to $20,500 a year and $100,000 per lifetime for graduate students.
Under the Act, loans for professional degrees, such as medical and law school, have also been given a new cap of $50,000 per year and $200,00 per lifetime. PLUS graduate loans have been eliminated under the Act.
Income-based repayment plans have been restructured under the Act as well, undoing the Biden Administration’s SAVE program.
Despite the changes stated in the Act, the timelines for the implementation of changes remain unclear.
Ferris Vice President of Governmental Affairs Dan Eichinger explained that the process of determining exactly how students will be affected by these changes has not begun.
“One of the big challenges we’re going to have is that the detail of how programs are getting implemented is done through the federal rule-making process, and that hasn’t started yet,” Eichinger said. “The U.S. Department of Education has no clue how they’re going to do that, and Congress has no idea how to direct the department to administer that program either.”
Eichinger also explained that employees who have been laid off at the Department of Education would have been assigned to much of the heavy lifting with these decisions, but those individuals are no longer there to facilitate that process.
Another provision of the One Big Beautiful bill was the addition of accountability earnings tests, which connect a school’s access to federal student loans based on how much money their graduates are earning post-education.
Eichinger expressed frustration over the lack of clarification within the reconciliation process.
“The accountability provisions are a really good example of why the reconciliation process is a terrible way to do budgeting at the federal level,” Eichinger said. “It makes a lot of assumptions about why people go to school in the first place. We don’t know if there is going to be any shades of gray to allow people to find a different career path.”
The official process of how these tests will be handled remains undefined, with questions surrounding who will be responsible for conducting the tests, how the data will be handled and what would truly happen if a school were to fail the test.
The student loan changes are stated to take effect in the summer of 2026, but the changing rules of policy implementation at the federal level make it difficult to anticipate when final details will be communicated.
Business Administration junior Natalie Langkam stated that for many students, loans are what allow them to earn an education.
“I think it’s important, so that school is more accessible for students,” Langkam said. “I hope that Ferris would be able to help, if something happened, because students need them.”
The future of graduate students attending Ferris programs such as pharmacy or optometry would also be susceptible to changes under the bill.
Manufacturing sophomore Wyatt Boersen explained that if graduate loans are not made available for students to use, they may have to look into different programs.
“Things are changing in general, it kind of scares them away,” Boersen said. “If I’m looking at a program, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to afford it, it’s going to make me hesitant.”
The university will need to wait for decisions to be made on details of the new rules prior to figuring out how to package financial aid and assist students.