Under Trump, only the rich can afford to attend graduate school | Opinion

A provision in the “big bill” adopted last summer is going to have a devastating effect on who can go to professional and graduate schools. The law eliminates a major federal student loan program and puts a cap on federal student loans for professional and graduate schools that is well below the cost of tuition, let alone the total costs post-college educational programs.

Unless this provision is changed, it is unclear how anyone except the very rich will be able to receive the training to be a doctor, nurse, lawyer, dentist, social worker or professor.

For those beginning their academic programs next year, the new law eliminates one of the major federal student loan programs starting next year, the Grad PLUS Loan Program. At my law school, 43% of students this year are receiving loans under this program. It is unclear whether other federal student loan programs will replace it.

For those who can get federal loans, the law sets a maximum student borrowing limit for professional schools at $50,000 per year and $200,000 over a lifetime. For graduate schools, the maximum borrowing is $20,500 per year and $100,000 over a lifetime.

To put this in perspective, the annual tuition at my law school, the UC Berkeley School of Law — a public university — is $65,000 a year for in-state students and almost $80,000 a year for out-of-state students. That does not include living expenses. This is similar to the cost at comparable law schools, both public and private, across the country.

Medical school and dental school tuition is much higher than that for law school, but students in these programs will be limited by the same cap in borrowing. And students in graduate school programs have a $20,500 cap in borrowing, which is far below the tuition and cost of attendance. (The Department of Education has also deemed nursing and business schools as graduate programs, not professional programs.)

A bad position for students

The cap on borrowing, which was part of the proposals in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is perhaps motivated by a naïve belief that this will force schools to lower tuition. But there is no realistic way to do this. Every school wishes it could charge less, but there is not a path to significantly reduce tuition without dramatically cutting the quality of education. Even then, there is no way to lower tuition enough to come within the borrowing caps set by the law.

At my law school, approximately 70% of our budget is for faculty and staff salaries and benefits (and most of that is for faculty), with 20% going to student scholarships and 10% going to everything else. Salaries have been set by contracts, which cannot be breached. We cannot legally — and do not want to — fire faculty; doing so would lessen the quality of education we provide and would irreparably harm our school.

Private lenders may step into the breach. But their terms are likely to be much more onerous than the loans that the federal government has provided. Some students will not able to qualify for private loans because of credit issues or because they have had an eviction or had a collection action against them. And private lenders have historically been less willing than the government to be flexible when a borrower is in difficult financial straits.

Ironically, a law that was ostensibly put into place to help student borrowers will ultimately put them in a much worse position.

My great fear is that many who want to be professionals will simply have to forego professional and graduate school because they cannot get the loans to pay the tuition and living expenses. I grew up in a working-class family and was the first to go to college. I paid for law school by taking out loans and working two jobs. I worry whether students in a situation like my own will be able to borrow enough to pay the tuition and living expenses.

Attack on higher education

The provisions in the law limiting student borrowing must be seen as part of a larger agenda by the Trump administration to harm higher education. It has cut off billions of dollars to universities for research, including for medical and scientific advances. It has targeted many universities for punishment, such as cutting off $400 million to Columbia, $584 million to UCLA and $2 billion to Harvard.

The Trump administration has also attempted to greatly restrict international students, who bring invaluable perspectives and experiences, as well as essential tuition dollars.

There is no justification for what Congress has done. I have been told that these provisions received relatively little attention from elected officials in light of the many other concerning stipulations of the “big bill.” These provisions received almost no media coverage, and I have found that few are even aware of them.

None of us benefit from making professional and graduate schools just for the rich. We all suffer when talented individuals who would be great doctors, nurses, lawyers, social workers and professors are kept from attending school because they cannot afford the tuition and the money is not there to borrow.

Congress can fix this by repealing the caps on loans it created and reinstating the Grad PLUS Loan Program. It should do so immediately.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

This story was originally published December 9, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Under Trump, only the rich can afford to attend graduate school | Opinion."