US nursing students face new financial barriers after the Department of Education excluded their courses from the ‘professional degree’ category under a sweeping overhaul of federal loan programmes. The reclassification, which significantly lowers the borrowing cap for postgraduate nursing studies, has drawn sharp criticism from industry leaders who warn it will deepen the nation’s healthcare workforce crisis. Nurse Courses Not A ‘Professional Degree’ Anymore The legislation, titled the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’, eliminates the Grad PLUS loans that many students have relied on to pay for postgraduate study and replaces them with a tighter system of caps and categories. Under the new rules, only students on recognised ‘professional degree’ tracks can access the highest loan limit of approximately £157, 000, while everyone else studying at graduate level is restricted to roughly £78, 000 in total borrowing. The exclusion of nursing means thousands of trainee nurses will have to finance years of expensive clinical education within that lower ceiling or abandon their plans altogether. At the same time, the bill delivers more than £1. 2 trillion ($1. 5 trillion) in tax cuts for the wealthiest 5 per cent of Americans, a contrast that has drawn criticism from healthcare unions. For working-class and first-generation students in particular, the American Nursing Association (ANA) warns that the new borrowing limits will act as a significant barrier to advanced training, closing off pathways into specialist roles that communities urgently need. With nurse shortages already running into the tens of thousands across the country, unions argue the law reads less like a technical funding fix and more like a policy detrimental to the future of the profession. Why Fewer Students in Nursing Courses Threatens Patient Care The ANA has warned that this change will impact patient outcomes as well as student finances. In a strongly worded letter, association President Jennifer Mensik Kennedy stated that excluding nursing will ‘severely restrict access to critical funding for graduate nursing education, undermining efforts to grow and sustain the nursing workforce. ‘ She argued that at a time of a ‘historic nurse shortage’, the move threatens the ‘very foundation of patient care’. Experts note this is particularly dangerous for rural and underserved communities. In many parts of the country, advanced practice registered nurses are the primary, and sometimes only, source of essential healthcare. By making it harder for these nurses to access the graduate-level training they need, the policy risks cutting off access to care for the most vulnerable populations, turning a student finance issue into a public health crisis. Campaigners fear it will deter talented students from entering a field that already demands long hours, intense emotional labour and exposure to trauma, citing research that links recognition and respect to retention in high-stress roles. As one health policy expert put it, the change is ‘a gut punch for nursing’, sending a message that the professionals who provide critical care are somehow less deserving of investment than lawyers or doctors.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-bill-strips-nursing-professional-status-puts-future-patient-care-risk-1757080
Tag Archives: first-generation
Bradshaw: Why I write about students — not the system
Most education coverage in America focuses on teachers, professors, or the institutions themselves. The system, not the student, dominates the headlines. We hear endlessly about teachers’ unions, tenure reform, DEI mandates, grade inflation, or the latest university scandal. Yet behind every statistic and policy paper stands a living, thinking student — the one figure almost invisible in our national conversation about learning.
That absence is what drives my column.
For decades, I’ve written about the real people who sit in classrooms, fill out applications, and fight to make sense of the world that older generations built for them. Students—whether they’re high-school juniors in Crown Point or international scholars from Istanbul—are the pulse of education. They embody its hopes, its fears, and increasingly, its disillusionment.
### The Missing Voice
Media coverage of education often treats students as objects of policy rather than subjects of experience. When standardized testing is debated, we hear from testing companies and university admissions officers, but rarely from the students who must live with the results.
When artificial intelligence enters the classroom, the op-eds feature professors warning about plagiarism, not the young people learning to wield these new tools responsibly and creatively.
The result is a portrait of education without its most essential voice. I write to correct that imbalance.
Students are not passive recipients of instruction; they are the experimenters, the skeptics, the restless minds who constantly test the assumptions of their elders. They are the ones who reveal where the system fails and where it still inspires.
Every column I write tries to give them back their agency.
### The View from the Desk, Not the Podium
My background shapes that focus. Having taught and advised hundreds of students over the years, I’ve learned that their stories—not institutional press releases—reveal the true state of American education.
A high-school senior wrestling with her essay for Stanford teaches us more about resilience and purpose than any government report on “student outcomes.” A first-generation college applicant struggling to balance ambition with family expectations exposes the moral tension that data can’t measure.
Too many journalists and educators write from the podium, looking down. I prefer to sit at the desk, looking across.
The difference in perspective changes everything: humility replaces jargon, empathy replaces policy, and the question becomes not “What should we teach?” but “What do they need to learn to thrive?”
### The AI Generation
Nowhere is this shift more urgent than in the age of artificial intelligence.
While faculty panels debate whether AI threatens “academic integrity,” students have already moved on—they’re using it to learn, to think, and sometimes to cheat, yes, but mostly to explore. They are the first generation whose intellectual tools are truly post-human, and they are figuring out the moral terrain as they go.
The media too often portrays them as reckless experimenters; I see them as pioneers. Their curiosity, not our fear, will determine the boundaries of this new world.
That’s why I cover AI not as an enemy of education but as a mirror of it. How students use or misuse it will tell us what kind of citizens they are becoming.
### Why It Matters
Writing about students is not a sentimental choice; it’s an intellectual one. They are the best measure of a culture’s health. How a society treats its learners says more about its future than how it pays its teachers.
A good student is not just a consumer of education but a participant in civilization’s ongoing argument with itself. When that argument becomes one-sided—when we stop listening to the young—we lose our capacity to renew ourselves.
That’s why I continue to focus on them, even as the headlines drift toward politics and policy.
Teachers deserve their due; teachers and professors deserve respect; but students deserve a voice. They are the beginning, not the end, of every educational story worth telling.
### Closing the Loop
So when I invite feedback from readers and editors, it isn’t just to polish a column—it’s to sharpen its purpose.
Every improvement in my writing is ultimately a service to the students whose experiences animate it. Their stories deserve clarity.
If journalism is, as someone once said, “the first draft of history,” then student journalism—the kind I strive to practice—is the first draft of the future.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/30/bradshaw-why-i-write-about-students-not-the-system/