I'm back!
Hi friends! I’ve decided to revive the ol’ substack after a few years of inactivity. I will use it as a place to share my recent publications and other public, professional activity. Thanks for following along. To kick things off, here is a piece I recently published on the AEI ideas blog. Enjoy and see you soon.
Democrats, Student Debt Can’t Be Both the Problem and the Solution
Student debt cannot be both the crisis that demands sweeping forgiveness and a tool that must remain unlimited for future borrowers. Yet that contradiction sits at the center of the backlash to Congress’s recent overhaul of federal graduate student lending.
Last year’s reconciliation legislation finally ended the era of unlimited federal lending for graduate and professional students, replacing the Grad PLUS system with clear borrowing caps. Graduate students now face aggregate federal loan limits, with higher caps reserved for programs defined as professional degrees, which tend to offer more reliable pathways to high earnings.
The reform addressed a long-standing problem: Students could borrow effectively unlimited sums, often accumulating debts far beyond what their post-degree earnings could reasonably support. This leaves taxpayers on the hook for loans that are unlikely ever to be repaid.
Rather than debate how best to implement these reforms or refine them where needed, critics quickly landed on a compelling talking point: nurses. Advocacy groups and many Democratic lawmakers argue that because many nursing programs are not included in the higher loan-limit category, the reform harms the profession and threatens the supply of nurses.
A recent congressional letter—led primarily by Democrats but signed by members of both parties—urged the Department of Education to revisit how professional degrees are defined, arguing that advanced nursing credentials such as nurse practitioner and nurse anesthetist programs require extensive training and often carry tuition costs that exceed the new borrowing limits. Lawmakers warned that limiting access to federal loans could discourage nurses from pursuing advanced credentials at a time when hospitals face workforce shortages and rural communities struggle to recruit specialized providers.
That narrative is frustrating—not because concerns about workforce development or educational access should be ignored, but because the way the issue has been framed obscures what the policy actually does and who it affects.
Those concerns deserve consideration. But they also raise a crucial question: how many students are actually affected?
Available evidence suggests the number is far smaller than public rhetoric implies. Analysis by Preston Cooper shows that most graduate nursing programs that were in consideration for the higher lending limits already fall within the new federal borrowing caps, meaning only students enrolled in the most expensive programs previously relied on borrowing beyond those limits. His work shows that among the 140 advanced nursing programs included in The College Scorecard, 115 had median student debt at degree completion of less than $100,000 (the new limit for graduate, not professional, degree programs). Several other programs were within a few thousand dollars of the cutoff.
Cooper’s analysis looks only at doctoral programs in nursing, because master’s programs, across all disciplines, were not considered for the higher loan limits (with the exception of theology programs, which tend to take longer to complete).
The Department of Education has clarified that 95% of nursing students borrow below the annual loan limit and therefore are not affected by the new caps. The Department also points out that the loan limits are limited to graduate programs and have no impact on undergraduate nursing programs, including four-year bachelor’s degrees and two-year associate’s degrees. 80% of the nursing workforce does not have a graduate degree.
This contradicts claims that the reform broadly blocks access to the profession. This is where the debate often skips an important economic reality. If federal loans no longer cover the most expensive programs, students may reconsider enrolling in those options. And when enrollment declines, schools face incentives to bring prices down. Steering students away from programs requiring excessive borrowing—and encouraging institutions to moderate tuition—are exactly the consumer-protection outcomes the reform was intended to produce.
What is perhaps most striking in the debate is the duality in how student debt itself is portrayed. Many of the lawmakers now objecting to loan limits have long argued that student debt is crushing borrowers and have supported sweeping forgiveness proposals. Yet when Congress finally imposes guardrails to prevent future students from accumulating those same unsustainable balances, those guardrails are cast as harmful. Debt cannot simultaneously be a life-ruining burden and an essential tool that students must have unlimited access to. One of those claims has to give.
Meaningful reform should invite serious discussion about implementation details, workforce implications, and how to ensure access to high-cost professional education without exposing students to unreasonable financial risk. But too much of the conversation has devolved into political theater rather than substantive engagement. Unlimited graduate borrowing was never a sustainable policy. Ending it was an overdue consumer-protection reform for students and a necessary safeguard for taxpayers. The real story is not that reform harms nurses. It is that meaningful higher education reform has finally occurred, and some critics are still searching for ways to argue against it rather than engage with making it better.
Link here:
https://www.aei.org/education/democrats-student-debt-cant-be-both-the-problem-and-the-solution/