By SUSAN JONES
The move by the Trump administration’s Department of Education to no longer classify nursing — along with social work and several fields of study in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences — as “professional degrees” has left many in higher education baffled, including Pitt’s School of Nursing Dean Christine Kasper.
“Frankly, am very confused as to the logic of any of it,” Kasper said. “Since the 1800s with Florence Nightingale, nursing has always been regarded by governments, as well as other health care providers in medicine, as a profession. There’s never been one time in history that nursing was not viewed in this way. So it is very disconcerting as to why this might be.”
The impact of the new classifications, which are scheduled to be implemented starting July 1, 2026, is that federal loans for students pursuing graduate or doctoral degrees in these programs would be capped at $100,000 lifetime, instead of the previous $200,000.
The higher loan amount would still be available for programs such as law, medicine and dentistry. Kasper pointed out that nursing students at Pitt regularly participate in interprofessional programs where they’re working with medical, pharmacy and dental students.
The Department of Education has sought to clarify that the reclassification is “not a value judgment about the importance of programs,” but has not changed its stand. The department says that “placing a cap on loans will push the remaining graduate nursing programs to reduce their program costs, ensuring that nurses will not be saddled with unmanageable student loan debt.”
Those costs vary by school, but can range up to almost $100,000 a year at a top-rated school like Duke University for a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist degree. “To get the clinical degree of either a master’s degree for two years or a doctor of nursing practice for three, you can see how $100,000 on a loan doesn’t go very far,” Kasper said.
In many places now, Kasper said, a very large portion of health care in the United States is delivered by nurses, especially in rural and underprivileged areas.
“Across this country, there are just a multitude of places where there are no physicians, there’s barely a pharmacy, but there’s usually the nurse or the nurse practitioner, the midwife, the nurse anesthetist,” she said. “Now even in the hospitals — where the time that residents can be on the floors is limited — we now have a category of nurse practitioners that are called acute care nurse practitioner. We have two of those programs here in gerontology and in pediatrics. They’re the ones that are on the floors of the hospital.”
She also pointed out that in many states, although not Pennsylvania, advanced practice nurses, like nurse practitioners, have “full practice authority, that means they can prescribe and they work to what we call the full extent of their license.”
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reports, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, that approximately 29,200 new Advanced Practice Registered Nurses, which are prepared in master’s and doctoral programs, will be needed each year through 2032 to meet the rising demand for primary and specialty care.
“The bedrock of health care are educated nurses,” Kasper said. “We’re trying to be very proactive for what the future of nursing is, for the future of health care in general, for how we will be behaving as peers with our physician colleagues, or dental and pharmacists, so that we can be on the cutting edge. This requires (nursing students) to taking genetics and applying genetics, to applying cutting edge research, to having sufficient math and science backgrounds. … Really nursing is an applied STEM science. …
“Health care is highly complex. Everything we do these days is very complex, and how you want to minimize the intellect of an entire segment of health care is very puzzling.”
Kasper also worries about the cascading impacts of this change. For instance, if loans are limited for master’s and PhD nursing programs, then where will the next generation of nursing faculty come from.
“You’re required always to have at least one degree higher than those you teach,” she said. “And if we were not doing that, then I guess none of us could be faculty here. That’s why we regard ourselves as, hopefully, one of the generators of future faculty. We put such an emphasis on the research from the time they’re freshmen going forward. We hope they go to grad school, either to be an excellent provider of care as a nurse practitioner and clinician, but many of those come back to be our faculty.”
The move to reclassify graduate nursing programs as not “professional degrees” is getting pushback, including from a bipartisan group of U.S. senators and representatives. In a letter sent to Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent, the lawmakers — including two representatives from the Pittsburgh area, Chris Deluzio and Summer Lee — said the change could exacerbate an existing worker shortage in the industry. “At a time when our nation is facing a health care shortage, especially in primary care, now is not the time to cut off the student pipeline to these programs,” the letter said.
Kasper said she is telling faculty, staff and students to “exercise your right as a citizen, to contact your legislators” and tell them what you think about the proposal.
In early 2026, the Department of Education will be releasing its proposal for what is known as a public comment period in the Federal Register. The public generally gets 30 to 60 days to weigh in and provide feedback.
Dean Kasper said that all the national nursing organizations are “mobilizing the membership for the organizations to go on the hill.” She also praised Pitt’s Office of Government Relations and Advocacy for the advice and assistance they have provided.
“Again, health care doesn’t work without the nurse practitioners and the social workers and all these other, other allied health professions,” she said.
Other areas of impact
The changes proposed by the Department of Education would also reclassify graduate and PhD level degrees in physician assistant, physical/occupational therapy, audiology, speech-language pathology, public health, engineering, accounting, education, social work and architecture as “non-professional.”
These include several degree programs in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.
Interim Dean David Beck said that SHRS “remains fully committed to ensuring that every student has an accessible, affordable pathway into and through our programs. As proposed federal guidelines take shape, we are evaluating their implications and modeling their potential impact across all SHRS disciplines.”
The school also is working with the Office of the Provost and the government relations office on outreach to elected officials and others “to communicate the significant negative impact that could result from these proposed changes.”
“SHRS has a proud legacy of making critical contributions to our professions,” Beck said. “SHRS graduates, faculty and staff have a demonstrated track record of improving quality of life, especially for Pennsylvanians. Our commitment is clear: to protect and strengthen a resilient pipeline of health and rehabilitation professionals who can serve every community.”
Social Work Dean Betsy Farmer was adamant in her response. “Social work IS a professional degree. Saying that it, and many other professions, are not professional degrees is damaging in many ways. It undermines professional credibility in the eyes of the general public and in interprofessional teams — minimizing the expertise that social workers bring to their work and organizations. It restricts access to the profession — this reclassification is likely to limit access to the field for students who are strongly drawn to the work and who need financial support to make their dream of a professional social work degree a reality.”
She also noted that “it is concerning that many of the professions that are in this category of classification are women-dominated professions — nursing, social work, education. This appears to be part of a larger attempt to undermine and minimize professional roles of women in our society. Taken together, this is incredibly concerning!”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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