National Harbor, Md.—With just one day remaining before graduate loan caps take effect, financial aid administrators who gathered Tuesday at the annual National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators conference found themselves struggling to understand next steps.
Although institutions have been preparing for July 1 for months, a court ruling late last week temporarily halting the Department of Education’s definition of “professional programs”—students in which can take out more federal student loans than other graduate students—threw a wrench into their plans. Guidance released late Monday further complicated the situation.
In a session on graduate student loans at the Gaylord Hotel and Conference Center in Maryland’s National Harbor, financial aid administrators said that there was still significant uncertainty about what the guidance meant in practice. The guidance included a revised list of 29 programs that, under the court’s ruling, now count as “professional,” including nursing, physician assistant, physical therapy and others that ED had been widely criticized for excluding from its previous definition. Several other programs, such as theology, were struck from the list.
