Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education made changes to the list of professional degrees. Marking Nursing, Education, Social work, accounting and a few other health care degrees as “unprofessional.”
This list of professional degree changes followed as part of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was recently passed earlier in July.
These changes mean that there will be a cap on student loans as part of an act aimed at reducing tuition costs. However, these changes are affecting students nationwide. Students coming from low-income households and backgrounds rely on financial aid and loans to pay for their education.
For students at Ferris, these concerns are sending students home for break with nervous minds.
Nursing sophomore Will Hatt is facing a similar situation as other students across these affected fields.
“My girlfriend, who’s a national security major, texted me articles about it because she has to read the news every morning for her discussion post. Let’s just say that it was not a good morning,” Hatt said. “I’m first gen, I have zero generational wealth, I don’t have a mom or a dad, I have my great grandma, my grandma, my papa, and that’s it.”
Students who rely on loans to get an education are left wondering how they will be able to afford it. While students in other programs are allowed to take out student loans without restrictive caps because their degrees are still on the federal list of professional degrees.
“I don’t think most of them who are making these decisions are processing the fact that in the end, they are going to need these same people who they’re calling unprofessional eventually,” Hatt said. “[For example], if you got into a car accident. Who are you going to? Who’s going to help you? Nurses, doctors, you see 20 minutes max, the nurses are the ones caring for you.”
Hatt expressed that the main distress of it all is that most of the degrees that were taken off the list of professional degrees are health care-related professions, professions that just a few years ago were considered essential workers.
“Nurses were called heroes during COVID; it goes from hero to unprofessional,” Hatt said. “What do they want us to be?”
Students across other fields are left feeling this same confusion. Such as Social Work junior, Lily Johnston, who feels discouraged after she found out about the professional degree changes.
“Hearing the word unprofessional was so confusing,” Johnston said. “I’m going to college for this, it’s something I’m really passionate about and all of a sudden I hear the word unprofessional and it feels disheartening.”
Johnston expressed that one of the biggest impacts these changes could bring is that we could see fewer people going into these professions, leaving gaps in professions such as education and nursing, which are already dealing with national shortages.
“We’re in a time where we need social workers; there’s already a shortage. I just don’t understand how this will help the shortage,” Johnston said. “Incoming students looking into these degrees are going to feel that financial cost and feel they’d rather go into something else, like business.”
Social Work senior and president of the Social Work Association, Syd Richardson, shares the same concern for students who are looking into these professions and those who have just started studying these professions.
“Students are going to see workers in their field dipping into poverty, and they’re going to wonder if this degree is really worth going into debt over,” Richardson said. “I mean, if I were a freshman or sophomore, now would feel like the prime time to switch majors, but since I’m a senior, I’ll be finishing out the program.”
While we’re still waiting to see the full outcome of these professional degree changes, Associations such as the National Association of Social Work are already fighting back with petitions. What we do know is that students nationwide are already feeling the weight.