After months of legal battles and thousands of borrowers left in limbo, AFT has claimed a hard-won victory: student loan forgiveness under Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans is back. But even as educators and public service workers begin receiving their long-awaited discharge notices, a new crisis is emerging that threatens to undermine access to higher education for the next generation of nurses, teachers, and health care professionals.
The Department of Education is sending long-awaited “golden letters” approving loan discharges for borrowers who’ve reached their 20- or 25-year payment thresholds. For educators, nurses, social workers, and other public service workers who’ve carried debt for decades, it’s the culmination of AFT’s nearly year-long legal fight. As we previously reported, the settlement requires the Department of Education to process forgiveness under Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plans, Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) plans, and Pay As You Earn (PAYE) plans under court supervision. But now borrowers are seeing the real-world results: actual discharges, not just promises.
What This Means for You Right Now
If you’ve been in an IDR plan for 20 or 25 years (240 or 300 qualifying payments), check your email and spam folder studiously. Approvals went out this week primarily for borrowers in the Income-Based Repayment plan, with more waves expected for ICR and PAYE borrowers in the coming weeks, according to reporting from Forbes.
For Texas AFT members still navigating the student debt maze, resources remain available through the AFT’s free student debt support platform. Members can also review previous AFT Student Debt Clinics to check their eligibility and ensure their payment counts are accurate or sign up here for upcming student debt clinics.
But Health Care Workers & Educators Face a New Crisis
Just as one fight ends, another begins. And this one strikes at the heart of how America trains its healthcare workforce: The Trump Administration is now proposing to slash federal student loan limits for nursing students to just $20,500 per year, down from current limits that can reach $50,000 annually for graduate professional programs. The Department of Education claims nursing, public health, and social work no longer qualify as “professional” programs.
Read that again: nursing and teaching is not professional.
In an interview with PBS News Hour, Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, calls the proposal “devastating.” The average cost of attendance for nursing graduate students exceeds $30,000 per year. The math just doesn’t work. Students pursuing advanced graduate practice nursing degrees to become nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, or nurse midwives would face a gap of nearly $10,000 per year that federal loans won’t cover.
The administration argues that most nursing students already fall under the proposed caps, which Kennedy disputes emphatically. While only about 20% of nurses have graduate degrees, that still represents roughly 1 million nurses. These are the advanced practice nurses providing primary care in rural Texas communities and underserved areas where physician shortages leave gaps to healthcare access.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act already eliminated all Title 8 federal funding for nursing education. Now comes the second blow: restricting student loans for those who want to pursue advanced nursing degrees. Last year, more than 80,000 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing schools, primarily because there aren’t enough nurse faculty to teach them. Many faculty positions require doctoral degrees, which would also be affected by the lower loan limits, worsening the cycle.
Why Lower Student Loan Caps Won’t Lower Costs
Defenders of the proposal argue that lower loan limits will force schools to reduce tuition and protect students from excessive debt. But research and experience tell a different story.
Students won’t stop borrowing. They’ll turn to private loans with higher interest rates and fewer protections. Unlike federal loans, private loans don’t qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF). For a nurse working in rural Texas, that difference matters enormously. Under PSLF, working in an underserved area for 10 years while making qualifying payments can lead to forgiveness of remaining federal loan balances. Private loans offer no such pathway, nor are they incentivized to do so.
The equity implications cut even deeper. The majority of nurses in America are white, while a majority of the U.S. population is not. Nursing leaders want the profession to better reflect the communities it serves, which research shows leads to improved patient outcomes. Lower-income students and students of color disproportionately rely on federal loans to finance their education and creating barriers to federal borrowing will further limit diversity in a field that desperately needs it.
Kennedy believes the proposal stems from misunderstanding rather than malice. The Trump Administration strongly supported advanced practice registered nurses during COVID-19 in the first term, recognizing their critical role in health care delivery. Fifty-seven nursing organizations sent a joint letter in October asking the Department of Education to maintain nursing’s professional designation. They’re hoping officials will reconsider before the public comment period opens.
But hoping isn’t enough. This is where the lesson from AFT’s IDR victory becomes crucial: organizing and fighting back works.
Defending Working People’s Access to Education
The connection between these two battles runs deeper than student loans. Both fights center on whether working people can access the education and training they need without being crushed by debt.
AFT’s IDR victory protected the promise made to borrowers decades ago: make your payments for 20 or 25 years, and your remaining balance will be forgiven. The Trump Administration tried to quietly abandon that promise. AFT sued, won, and forced the government to follow the law. Now the administration proposes to redefine who counts as a “professional” in ways that would make it harder for the next generation of nurses, teachers, social workers, and public health workers to afford their education. It’s a different mechanism but the same underlying attack on working people’s pathways to professional careers.