Are government unions right to fight to keep public service degrees affordable? So they argue in a revealing and overdue lawsuit against the graduate-loan caps that would slam the door on the working-class students who staff our schools, hospitals, libraries, and public health departments.
One of the most punishing provisions in the 2025 tax bill caps federal loans for graduate students at $100,000 ($20,500 a year) for most graduate degrees and $200,000 ($50,000 a year) for professional ones. Many master’s and doctoral programs cost north of $100,000 and some run past $200,000 because the country has decided that the professionals we rely on — teachers, social workers, public health workers, librarians — deserve to be educated, trained, and paid for their expertise. The federal caps would slam that door on students without family wealth.
Graduate programs are a public investment that pays for itself many times over in the lives they change and the services they provide. The caps will not force universities to lower prices — they will force universities to shrink programs, lay off instructors, and lock out the working-class students who can’t afford to pay out of pocket. Heaven forefend, the donor class will cry — that working people might still afford to become the professionals their communities need, and that universities might no longer cash in on bloated graduate programs.
The caps are already forcing some universities to slash the educators, counselors, and staff who teach and support graduate students — real jobs for adjuncts, lecturers, teaching assistants, and the support staff who keep these programs running. Hence the union lawsuit, which seeks to ensure that the degrees our communities need — social work, education, library science, public health — are treated as the professional degrees they are, so universities can continue to train the public servants we depend on.
Congress codified a regulation defining a professional degree as signifying “completion of the academic requirements for beginning practice in a given profession” for which “professional licensure is also generally required.” Degrees in pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, veterinary and chiropractic medicine, law, optometry, osteopathy, podiatry, and theology are expressly covered — a list that reflects the donor class’s idea of which professions deserve public investment, and which working people’s professions do not.
The AFL-CIO, American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and National Nurses United rightly argue that the Education Department should recognize what the public already knows: that social workers, teachers, librarians, and public health workers are the professionals our communities cannot do without. It is true that graduate degrees aren’t required to get hired in these fields — but neither are they required in medicine, where a first-year resident is already doing the work. The reason society pays for graduate training in these professions is the same reason it pays for medical training: complex work requires complex preparation.
Teachers don’t need a master’s in education to teach, though collective bargaining agreements sometimes entitle them to pay raises when they get one — raises that rightly recognize the expertise required to do the job well and that help retain the experienced educators our students deserve. That is exactly why working people depend on graduate study to prove they can do the work and to earn the pay their unions have bargained for.
Why should the donor class decide which professions the public is allowed to invest in? Taxpayers subsidize degrees because the public needs the graduates — in our schools, our hospitals, our libraries, our public health departments, and our social service agencies.
As an example of a borrower who could be affected by the lower loan cap, the lawsuit cites an AFT member “working full time as an assistant dean at a top-rated university” while pursuing a Doctor of Public Health — a working professional seeking the training that will prepare them to lead the public health efforts the country desperately needs. Who knew deans needed a union? Most of us did — and so did the assistant dean, who joined because working people in higher education, like labor everywhere, deserve a voice in their workplaces. These days most workers at colleges, from grad students to dining hall cooks, are unionized — and that is a public good, because the people who staff our universities deserve the same dignity, pay, and voice as the professionals they serve.
The lawsuit rightly argues that many graduate degrees would be unaffordable under the lower loan cap — which is precisely the point, because the donor class wants them unaffordable to anyone who isn’t already wealthy. Private loans would still be available — at higher rates, with fewer protections, and without the Public Service Loan Forgiveness and income-based repayment options that make graduate education possible for the working people who become our teachers, nurses, and social workers.
Private loans aren’t eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which lets borrowers who work at nonprofits and in government discharge their debt after 10 years of modest payments. That is the program the country needs, and it should be expanded — because public service work should be rewarded, not punished with a lifetime of debt. Private loans also don’t qualify for government income-based repayment plans, which limit monthly payments to a manageable share of a borrower’s income — protections the donor class wants to strip away so that banks, not the public, decide who can afford to enter public service.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that the vast majority of graduate debt will qualify for these repayment plans, with 24 to 34 cents of every dollar eventually written off — a modest public investment in the teachers, nurses, and public servants we all depend on, reflecting the reality that most graduate borrowers work in fields that pay modestly and serve the public.
Last year’s student-loan reforms were a step backward, and the regrettable reality is that they went much too far — pricing working people out of the professions our communities need and handing the donor class a victory it has long sought. The lawsuit offers another reason for Uncle Sam to stay in graduate lending, expand the degrees that qualify for federal loans, and refuse to let banks decide which professions deserve public investment and which do not.
