Degrees Reclassified: Navigating the New Professional Degree Rules and Saving on Grad School.

The Department of Education has sharpened the distinction between traditional professional degrees and other graduate programs, with real consequences for how much students can borrow. Programs such as medicine, dentistry, and law still qualify for the highest federal loan limits, while many other graduate fields no longer sit in that same category. Students in fields such as nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and public health may find that their federal borrowing caps are lower, even though the total cost of their degree remains high. At the same time, the average in-district community college tuition is under $10,000 per year. In comparison, in-state tuition at public four-year universities is closer to ten or eleven thousand dollars per year, which quickly multiplies over the span of a full degree. When you layer graduate school on top of that, the stakes of every decision grow even higher.