Unraveling fact from fiction
To the editor:
Some recent contributions to the Eagle’s “Letters to the Editor” have expressed comments that may have been perceived as facts rather than opinions and as such laid out incorrect assessments of our U.S. Department of Education’s recent declassification of professional degrees and how that declassification may affect the ability of a student to acquire a federal loan for their chosen field of endeavor.
Certain progressive voices have been fear mongering about the Department of Education supposedly excluding nursing degrees from being eligible for graduate student loans. This is simply not true. The definition of a “professional degree” is an internal definition used by the Department to distinguish among programs that qualify for higher loan limits, not a value judgement about the importance of programs. It has no bearing on whether a program is professional in nature or not.
Under the Act, the agency is required to identify “professional degree” programs that will be eligible for higher federal lending limits. A negotiating committee convened by the agency has proposed a consensus definition that designates Medicine (M.D.), Dentistry (D.D.S./D.M.D.), Law (L.L.B./J.D.) and several other high-cost programs as eligible for a $200,000 borrowing limit. Students who pursue a degree in other graduate or doctoral programs would be capped at $100,000 in federal loans. Undergraduate students are generally not affected by the new lending limits.
So, there is no reclassifying of these professions as “non-professional” as was stated in a recent “contribution.” These loan limits will help drive down the cost of graduate programs and reduce the debt students have to take out. Graduate students received more than half of all new federal student loans originated in recent years, and graduate student loans now make up half of the outstanding $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.”
Four years of Biden-omics pushed up the cost of everything we consume or need in our daily lives including housing, insurance, transportation, medicine and food. Our current administration has been forced to cope with the utter and complete mismanagement by the previous administration of our country and that includes the very crisis they created, that of “affordability”.
Max Christian
St. James City