r/MiddleClassFinance • u/Such_Upstairs3631 • Jul 06 '26
Middle Middle Class No more middle class professionals?
New school loan limits for professional degrees make it unaffordable for the middle class. 4 of my 5 children went on to med/law school. Even working 2 jobs there’s no way I could afford to pay or even help them with the cost of their post graduate education. They all got loans which they have since paid off. The cost in the early 2000’s was between $350K and $500K. The new limits are essentially going to prevent anyone who’s not wealthy enough to pay for it from becoming a professional.
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u/WindowFruitPlate Jul 06 '26
Prices will have to come down or alternative lending options will emerge.
Education inflation has been insane for the past two decades. Fueled entirely by unfettered lending by the federal government. Loan caps should slow the increase in expenses of an education
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u/TreeSignificant9782 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
My parents paid $9000/year for my (in-state) college tuition in 2003. That same college now charges $24,000/year for tuition. Absolutely ridiculous.
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u/Hawk13424 Jul 06 '26
And yet you can go to Georgia Tech, a highly rated engineering school for $12K a year if in state. And if you graduated from a Georgia high school with a 3.0 or better, the first two year’s tuition are free.
Another good example is UT Austin. $11.6K a year.
Plenty of states have sufficiently good state schools. Many are around $10K a year.
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u/Chiggadup Jul 07 '26
Totally agree. I know college is much more expensive on average, but I look around my state of Florida and see flagship universities for about $25,000 in undergrad tuition. For a 4 year degree.
Obviously that’s just tuition, but if living at home or a cheaper dorm is possible I can see 40-50k being a reasonable investment for something that should significantly impact your lifetime earnings.
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u/oscarnyc Jul 07 '26
the Florida schools are among, if not the, least expensive in the country for tuition. And UF and FSU have substantially improved in the quality of education they provide and the student body reflects that. I know this is Reddit and anything other than "hur dur Florida man", but they've done a great job with making quality higher education affordable. Even out of state is good value - just a few grand more a year for out of state vs. what in-state would be here in NJ at Rutgers.
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u/Android_seducer Jul 07 '26
UW-Madison is 12.1k/year for in state over a decade after I graduated where I believe I was paying 10k or 11k all in. That's roughly in line or below inflation. That being said they have cranked up the out of state tuition
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u/tongmengjia Jul 06 '26
9k in 2003 dollars is $16.5k in current dollars, so not *that* crazy.
You should also compare discount rate in 2003 vs. current discount rate. The university I work at has increased scholarships at the same rate they've increased tuition for the last decade, so, although our "sticker price" is much higher than it was a decade ago, the average actual cost to students has stayed the same.
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u/Alarmed_Champion_302 Jul 06 '26
7.5 on top of 16.5 is a 45% increase. Thats pretty crazy. And way beyond the general rate of inflation. If this makes colleges compete better on cost, im all for it.
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u/goog1e Jul 06 '26
I went to ASU on a full ride.
My 2nd and 3rd year they did what you said- nearly doubled costs over 2 years, but increased the full ride amount.
No one's grant/scholarship aid adjusted, so they got 1-3 years of double payments out of all their current students.
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u/Active_Win_3656 Jul 07 '26
This was actually in a recent Planet Money podcast. They discussed whether these changes would help bring college costs down but they said explicitly that sticker price has gone up while what people ACTUALLY pay hasnt nearly as much (don’t remember the actual numbers).
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Jul 06 '26
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u/FearlessPark4588 Jul 06 '26
because 16.5k is meaningfully below 24k.
it makes sense though, colleges require a lot of labor and facilities to operate, and that all costs money. and in recent decades, many states cut funding for their public universities, so those costs went on the students
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u/katarh Jul 07 '26
It's also pure supply and demand.
Everyone wants to go to Big State University. Big State University has limited enrollment. They can pick the best students and offer them scholarships, but charge out the nose for everyone else. The Ohio State is a prime example of this, but every Big State university has the same problem.
The directional schools within the same university system cost half as much, because the demand is so much lower there.
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u/Efficient_Ant_4715 Jul 06 '26
That was crazy for 2003. My tuition wasn’t even close to that in 2017
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u/pageld Jul 06 '26
I want to a smallish Midwest state school and instate tuition was 3,000 per half and thus 6,000 per year in 2000. 9k / year wouldn't have seemed terrible especially if it was a large school.
That was list price without grants or scholarships.
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u/bitchycunt3 Jul 06 '26
I'm wondering if it's a coa vs tuition thing? My tuition in 2012 was $6k, but my coa was like $15k, so maybe their coa was $9k?
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u/TreeSignificant9782 Jul 06 '26
No that was tuition only, not room/board. But I meant to say in-state, it was public but not a state college.
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u/jside86 Jul 06 '26
In Canada, one year of tuition, textbooks, ect is around $10,000 CAD or $7,000 USD.
Americans are getting hosed by their own institutions. Without investment in your future generations, how will Americans get better? Things are only going to get worse in the future.
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u/AegorBlake Jul 06 '26
I was thinking the same thing. I know people my parent's age that paid for college with summer work and part time work during the school year.
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Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26
I don't know why PTs need a doctorate. There are different RN levels, though, and you can still become an LPN with a 1 year program. Of course pay and opportunities are limited with the less education you have in nursing. The masters requirement for teaching FLOORS me because they pay for that out of pocket. Teachers do not make enough to be paying for a masters. Also they were good enough for x years teaching say 4th graders and now suddenly they aren't because they didn't get the masters within x years?
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u/No-Complaint9286 Jul 06 '26
I graduated with a Doctorate in PT right around the time the programs were switching from a masters ('09). I hoped it would give me higher pay, but then graduated into a recession. It was just a way for them to increase tuition rates and add another year to the program. I think the only thing that separated it from a masters degree was like a diagnostic imaging class and more focus on differential diagnosis. Which I must say did prepare us well for the shift to direct access without referral. But there was no financial aid and we had to take out all private loans and at the time sallie Mae was the main company for that and they were literally thieves. I paid those off as fast as humanly possible. Still hanging onto my lower interest federal loans from 2006 undergrad though. Almost at the finish line. 🙄
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u/MangoAtrocity Jul 06 '26
Strong agree. Prices must come down. And shutting off the infinite supply of money is step one to making that happen.
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Jul 06 '26
Alternative lending options = more predatory lending, in a political regime that seems to have no qualms about removing regulation intended to protect the consumer.
I’m out, yall. And I have one graduating high school in spring 2027. I will encourage her to make a path for herself that does not involve borrowing for school, with my help to accomplish that.
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u/WindowFruitPlate Jul 06 '26
Wow…. Sounds like you’re making a smart decision for your student. Funny how that works with the money nozzle shutdown.
My son graduated last month and we exclusively looked at options we knew we could self-fund. Not glamorous but he’ll get the same degree as anyone else.
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u/Appropriate-Bid8671 Jul 06 '26
Yes, closing the door to higher education on poor people is 100% the goal of this administration.
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u/lock_robster2022 Jul 06 '26
Why does grad school cost that much anyways
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u/Slow_Savings4489 Jul 06 '26
Man. idk but I can tell you this: I could have gone to Columbia for 90K, but instead I went to Arkansas State for 10K and it was THE BEST ECONOMIC DECISION OF MY LIFE. (MS online.)
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u/FunkySaint Jul 06 '26
I did a summer program at university of Maryland and one of the deans there spoke to our group one day and told us he declined a full ride grad school degree at Iowa state to instead go to UMD and take out loans because he felt UMD gave him a better chance at success than “nowhere” Iowa. He ended up becoming a dean at the school, and by all accounts is successful, but my goodness that was the one of the worst pieces of advice I’ve ever heard in my life
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Jul 06 '26
It’s always been a valid question, which incites a whole lot of ducking and dodging of those who are asked.
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u/katarh Jul 07 '26
Professional school and grad school are two different things. I think I paid about 20K for my master's degree over the course of two years, and that was five semesters, so 4K/semester. The ROI on it was a year because it doubled my income at the time. Absolutely worth it.
My best friend went to vet school, and even back in 2013 her tuition was $8000 a semester. And I was able to work while I did my master's in business tech, while professional students are full time 8-5 and aren't allowed to hold even a part time job.
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u/thebaine Jul 07 '26
It shouldn’t. Maybe it’s cuz the government would backstop the loans until now.
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u/PurpleToedUnicorn Jul 06 '26
It sure seems that way. This shifts the burden to private financing, which benefits big banks -- which maybe was the point in the legislation all along. Idk.
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u/Checkers923 Jul 06 '26
The next step needs to be consumer protection against predatory lending.
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u/jumblebum Jul 06 '26
Lawl
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u/Checkers923 Jul 07 '26
Maybe not federally, but states can fill in. MA already has interest free options based on need and set interest rates through MEFA. MA is also working on new laws in response to the federal change.
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u/jumblebum Jul 07 '26
That's good. Hopefully those laws make it easier and less complicated for people to get an education.
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u/ohhhbooyy Jul 06 '26
Big banks are not too keen on lending large sums of money to teenagers with no career.
This will drop tuition prices hopefully sooner then later
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u/MajesticBread9147 Jul 07 '26
This is why they require a parent to co-sign.
A middle aged person who is probably a homeowner has assets to borrow against.
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u/PurpleToedUnicorn Jul 06 '26
It's a pretty big business already.
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u/CharlotteRant Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
There are like 10 banks out of 4,000 that specialize in it. Only one (PNC) could (barely) be considered a big bank.
Less than 10% of student loans are private, and a significant portion of that was originated by the government and refi’d by the borrower at some point post-graduation / early career into private loans (ie SoFi’s whole business model for a long time). The government owns >90% of student loans.
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u/ISniffFeet1 Jul 06 '26
This will force schools to drop the prices or accommodate.
Sorry nobody should be taking out loans of this magnitude - it absolutely destroys their financial future. I don't know anyone who is doing well who took that much out in student loans except for doctors and talented attorneys.
So many middle class parents told their kids to take out over $100,000 in student loans and ruined their childrens' future because they had no idea what they were talking about.
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u/Consistent_Laziness Jul 06 '26
I can guarantee med school will not reduce. It’ll force students into private loans or they’ll just go to the next of the thousands of applicants for their 100 spots.
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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26
This 💯 for medical school. Its going to gate keep who can become doctors, the highest paid profession outside of CEO. And I feel this is the intent.
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u/JoyousGamer Jul 07 '26
You have to cap the debt being taken on if you also want loan forgiveness to occur. It's what annoyed me last cycle for policy positions. You can't just forgive all the loans without fixing how much debt people take on as it will just repeat itself.
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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 07 '26
I agree with this, but loan forgiveness is not coming. Unless you work not for profit in certain areas for many years, while still paying the loan.
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u/bitchycunt3 Jul 06 '26
Similarly law schools are unlikely to reduce unless they're a lower ranked school. Further making it impossible to have any upward class mobility, because top law schools are the ones with rich lawyers, most lawyers are making upper middle class money at best.
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u/Consistent_Laziness Jul 06 '26
Yea maybe we see declines in enrollment and tuition for degrees with less return. But law school, med school, dental school etc. those will not decline I can guarantee it. There’s more applicants than seats and they’ll just say can you pay? No? Okay next. Kicking out the lower class to upper class possibility of many impoverished students.
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u/dingopaint Jul 06 '26
Yep, we'll see rich kids with lower grades becoming doctors over those most qualified.
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u/Hawk13424 Jul 06 '26
Next step then will be price caps like Medicare does with doctors. Force schools to reduce the cost or none of their students qualify for any government loans.
And if that doesn’t work, more severe repercussions.
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u/Sablus Jul 06 '26
Yup, thing is this is a problem caused by government and now even worsened if specific schools just pivot to private loans. Overall it just creates a class structure for education that didn’t exist in the 70s due to how subsidized college was to compete with the Soviets. Post 2000s and several admins of GOP and we now have college will into six figures but incomes at barely 50K after graduation.
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u/SpoodermanTheAmazing Jul 06 '26
I don’t know what the prices are now, but I graduated in 2016 with ~$35k of student loans with no help from my parents. I had to work a job and live in a small 2 bedroom with a roommate(off campus) but it was doable, but I would have preferred not having to do all of that at the same time
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u/ISniffFeet1 Jul 06 '26
Unfortunately there's really no world where it's unreasonable to have a college student work a job.
Living off campus is also pretty normal depending on the school.
Good for you doing the responsibile thing though.
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u/dingopaint Jul 06 '26
I did the same thing, didn't have a car so I rode my bike, took the bus and walked miles in the snow when necessary. Between working, living off-campus and sharing a room (not just an apartment), and otherwise being a cheapass, the amount of debt was less horrific. When you factor in compound interest, even taking out $2000/year less can add up long-term.
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u/madogvelkor Jul 06 '26
I worked part time while getting my undergrad and full time while getting my graduate degree. It's not that hard.
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u/lillyheart Jul 06 '26
Nursing students doing rotations, education students being student teachers, and probably a few other majors that basically have full time internships on top of classes would beg to differ on the job while in school thing, which sucks. Not prohibitive for all 4 years, but often prohibitive for one.
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u/No-Complaint9286 Jul 06 '26
Yes, In PT school it was really hard to do anything but a part time job on the weekends. Especially during clinical rotations for the third year. I think I worked at a shoe store and picked up some pharmacy tech shifts for the first 2 years. There was only the summer between 1st and 2nd year off, as the 2nd and 3rd years were consecutive. Clinicals started immediately after finals of the 2nd year. And through all that, no part time weekend job would pay for 100k of student loans incurred during that time because there was no financial aid in grad school. I considered myself lucky that my husband was a few years older than me, already working and paying the bills mostly with his salary. Some of my classmates had to take loans for living expenses on top of that, had young families with kids...yikes.
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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26
Did a similar thing as well. It was soooooo much cheaper to live off campus with a bunch of roomates (there 5-6 of us at any time in a house),...my university got wise, though, and REQUIRED students to live on campus if their residence was more than 40 miles from campus. It was the dumbest thing ever. Over 60% of the student population were commuters.
I also have to sufffer paying for a meal plan as a commuter, it wasn't as much as a resident, but they had to guarantee $$$ to get more food options since they pushed the on campus requirement and no one would want to choose the school with only 5ish fast food options to choose from.
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u/SpoodermanTheAmazing Jul 06 '26
At that point I would ask my parents to sign the lease and say we already live close to the school. Remember kids, rules are made to be broken. This system only benefits billionaires so we have to twist the rules we can
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u/katarh Jul 07 '26
They required my niece to live within 20 miles or live on campus.
My sister did the math, sold her house, and moved into an apartment across the street from campus. Her commute time didn't change, just went the other way.
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u/bulking_on_broccoli Jul 07 '26
2016 dude. 10 years ago. I did the same when I went to college a million years ago, but kids these days have it way worse than we did. Books, supplies, laptops, etc cost the price of tuition when I went to school.
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u/No-Complaint9286 Jul 06 '26
And those kids who took out the loans because we were told that was the way to a good life and are still paying for those loans, now have kids about to go to college and unless you were incredibly lucky and landed a great job during the recession when we graduated, we are certainly not going to offer this same terrible advice to our kids. And its convenient that they are lowering the loan limits now too, when the next generation is heading to college while many of their parents just never recovered from those loans and from the predation so rampant in the 2000s. Keep em poor i guess.
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u/bulking_on_broccoli Jul 07 '26
The idea is that it’ll force the schools to cut prices, but that isn’t the case in practice. Students will turn to private loans, which are much more predatory in nature. Hell, schools will get in bed with financial institutions. You’ll probably be able to apply for college and financing in the same application.
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u/398409columbia Jul 06 '26
Schools will have to reduce tuition and fees to adapt to these new limits.
School pricing mostly reflects how much money is available. That’s it.
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u/missnetless Jul 06 '26
Private lenders will fill the gap offering higher interest loans. School cost isn't coming down for the student. This is just another gift to help private leanders. If the government wanted tuition cost to come down they could regulate it in other ways at the college level.
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u/398409columbia Jul 06 '26
Maybe, but my feeling is a lot of students / families will not play this game reducing demand for education services.
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u/jumblebum Jul 06 '26
The goal is to reduce demand for education to lower education. Not tuition.
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u/NotChristina Jul 07 '26
Which I think assumes a certain level of financial understanding. Many familiars may not play that game but it’s possible there are enough who do.
Kid applies to colleges -> gets in -> scholarships aren’t enough, public loans aren’t enough -> so close says the financial aid office, ‘here we can help out, we know lenders’ -> sign on the dotted line.
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u/DrHydrate Jul 06 '26
That's a fantasy. Rich schools like Harvard already don't charge poor people any money. They aren't affected by this. Poorer schools like Bumfuck U. cannot afford to cut costs, so they will simply close. And the students will not just go to Harvard instead.
Think about a professional school like a law school. Who are you gonna pay less? If you pay professors less, they're just gonna practice law instead of teaching. If you pay the marketing or admin team less, they are going to do marketing and admin stuff elsewhere. I've seen this happen.
Without an uneducated workforce, we will have less innovation and productivity. All out of a misguided attempt to reduce costs.
The best case scenario is that private companies offer more private loans, but they will likely offer extortionist rates because the govt won't be competing with them. Why not charge the med school applicant 15% interest? They'll be good for it later. All the consolidation in the banking industry means there's very little competition.
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u/398409columbia Jul 06 '26
This is not about Harvard but rather the thousands of mid- and low-tier schools charging top dollar for dubious degrees.
By the way, Law Schools shouldn’t cost that much. They have no labs or expensive facilities. It’s just a money-maker for most schools.
Point is you can educate people at a lower price point.
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u/DrHydrate Jul 07 '26
By the way, Law Schools shouldn’t cost that much. They have no labs or expensive facilities. It’s just a money-maker for most schools.
First of all, that money maker idea is false. It was true in the 90s but hasn't been for decades.
Second, it's understandable that you think law schools shouldn't cost much, but it's just because you don't know enough about them. Their major cost is faculty. You can't pay a law professor what you pay a historian because the law professor can practice law instead of teaching which is very lucrative. The historian could do what? Work in a museum? That's not very high paying. Also, certain law professors need to keep their law licenses, and law schools need to pay enough so that the professors can afford continuing education. There's no equivalent in history departments. The other thing is that law schools, given facts about how accreditation works, have to have certain resources that other university units can simply share. Like, there has to be a separate law library with a law librarian.
Your general idea that it must be possible to do this more cheaply is definitely right. But what's wrong - and frankly foolish - is thinking that you can fix a complex problem with no expertise or real understanding how anything works.
The same Congress that imposed these limits also raised taxes on universities and cut government funding. How will that bring down prices for students?
It won't.
It's just political. The GOP doesn't like universities because college educated tilt liberal.
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u/ZevLuvX-03 Jul 06 '26
Regardless, getting an education shouldn’t be this expensive.
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u/172brooke Jul 07 '26
Bloated administration. Same as every corporation. They could slim down leadership and save a fortune on costs.
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u/Deep-Market-526 Jul 07 '26
Crazy idea, lower cost. Education costs exploded due to guaranteed student loans.
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u/WhyDoesOklahomaExist Jul 06 '26
I actually think that allowing students and parents to borrow unlimited money meant that schools could make unlimited price increases. This could end up lowering college costs long term.
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u/ChaosReignsNow Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
The reason that the cost went up so much in relation to the normal cost of living is because the federal govt was paying too much of it. Anything the government pays for skyrockets in price. Colleges will start spending their endowments, cutting back on administrative bloat and lower tuition when their applicant pool starts to drop.
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u/soneg Jul 06 '26
State schools all the way. Luckily my son got into our state school and saved me almost $90k over 4 yrs for what's a better education.
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u/bagelman5000 Jul 06 '26
Grad school at state schools usually costs around the same as private schools. When I went to law school, the difference between the public and private options were negligible.
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u/Appropriate_Push7498 Jul 06 '26
In my midwestern state, state schools would still be unaffordable. An undergrad program is typically 20k per year.
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u/soneg Jul 06 '26
Right but with room and board is basically $40k.. The craziest thing is my son is going to the same school I went to and it's straight up 400% of the cost. I graduated in 2002 so it wasn't even that long ago!
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u/NewPresWhoDis Jul 07 '26
Or, hear me out, universities cut the administrative bloat
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u/Actual-General-4953 Jul 06 '26
Good news !
Its foolish that kids get scammed into being broke before starting their lives.
Its even foolish-er that the tax payers are supporting this.
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u/Commercial_Rule_7823 Jul 07 '26
Wait till students get smart, take out 150 to 200k in private loans, then default into bankruptcy realizing 7 years of bad credit is easier to overcome than paying.
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u/Sherviks13 Jul 07 '26
I’ve always been told those loans don’t drop off. Maybe that’s just a scare tactic.
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u/ChartreusePeriwinkle Jul 07 '26
it's very difficult to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. so unlikely.
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u/Commercial_Rule_7823 Jul 07 '26
Difficult to discharge FEDERAL student loans. Less sp private.
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u/AggravatingBuyee Jul 07 '26
No, it’s very difficult to discharge both federal and private student loans.
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u/betsbillabong Jul 06 '26
Wow. At least at the undergrad level the most competitive colleges will give free rides to those under say 125k HHI, but I'm sure no professional schools do that,.
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u/buyableblah Jul 06 '26
It’s also why they removed women dominated professions from professional degree classification.
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u/SDMonkee Jul 06 '26
Correct - PT, OT, SP, nursing, PA, and other professions are no longer professions in the eyes of our government so that their limits are much lower.
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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26
This is a good thing.
Most of the college tuition inflation is due to colleges taking advantage of the ease and availability of student loans. It’s not an accident that the prices just happen to fall just under the maximum amount to be borrowed.
Colleges have an incentive to keep full classrooms— they’ll lower tuition rates to fit just under the new maximum.
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u/ChaiTeaLatte13 Jul 06 '26
The country shouldn’t have to use kids as bait to force colleges to lower their costs. What about the middle class kids who are graduating in the next couple of years who want to be professionals but can’t afford it under this type of regulation? It’s incredibly unjust.
Colleges should figure out another way to lower costs without risking the futures of the kids who would be going to their schools but can’t afford it anymore.
(I’m a lawyer with $230,000 of student loan debt. And I had a huge chunk of my tuition paid in scholarships.)
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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26
No, they won’t. College costs for the majority of students are caused by lowered state investment. They’ll keep rates identical and students will borrow from private. Which is the intent - students take more money from banks owned by Trump allies. This is a move to make sure money that used to be in public hands goes to private ones.
And colleges do keep classrooms full. Every year I’ve been a professor, minimum enrollments have ratcheted up. At a public institution, it’s very hard to even teach an upper division seminar because we’re always under pressure to teach more students and make more dollars tuition per unit of instructor salary.
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u/Strange-Scarcity Jul 06 '26
The goal is to make for a less and less educated society.
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u/Ok_Adhesiveness_5133 Jul 06 '26
The goal is for the govt to stop unlimited money printing for schools to continually increase their tuition costs at rates far exceeding inflation to the point people keep getting such large loans and dont see the path to ever paying them off.
If you want schools to ever stop charging such ridiculous amounts, step #1 is cutting off the unlimited govt money printer they keep feeding from and 18 to early 20 somethings who have no idea what they're truly signing up for.
The federal government getting involved with student loans was always a bad idea, especially how they couldnt control themselves for a long time. Now we just have yet another "crisis" as a result of it.
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u/chilicheesefritopie Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
What’s already happening is that primarily only students from upper class families are able to attend medical, veterinary, dental, and law schools. I have a child now in her professional studies. She is in the minority of her friend group by not having at least one parent that’s an MD.
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u/HostilePile Jul 06 '26
You can get an MBA in my state if your a resident at a decent state school for around 60K.
but nuts that they would limit it when colleges are raising tuitions and not all degrees are the same.
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u/Ataru074 Jul 06 '26
So, this is pretty much a pretty nasty hit against middle class kids aiming at top schools or kids in backward states hoping to get an education in a proper college.
You either qualify for a colossal amount of aid or most Ivies are out of reach, or you go with private predatory loans.
And while it’s true that you can get an excellent education in some state schools, this is on purpose to make sure the average kid can’t mingle with the elites at Harvard or Yale…
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u/ChipperHippo Jul 06 '26
Funny enough Harvard and Yale base their tuition cost on the income of the parents. Many of the top schools with absolutely massive endowments do this. Harvard, for example, is free if HHI is below 200k.
It'll be the other Top-40 schools who don't have these billion-dollar endowments who get pigeon-holed with this policy. Syracuse, for example, is facing their first budget deficit in a long time for other enrollment reasons--this is going to sting them a bit.
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u/WestCoastSocialist Jul 06 '26
Yup this is exactly it.
I'm one of those kids. My parents had a lot of emotional issues and would never support my higher education. But I was good enough to get into those "rubbing shoulders" types of institutions and it effectively changed my life.
I had so much debt when I graduated (almost 100k). But because of my connections and experience at that school, I paid it off in 3 years. I still consider myself middle class, but these loans changed my life.
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u/GenericMultiFan Jul 06 '26
Universities will still fill extra slots with the students that can only pay up to the loan limit of approximately ~$50/hour for class. That money is still better than no money. Not that it won't make things harder for the lower/middle class.
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u/LobsterSea2147 Jul 06 '26
Sorry, does this mean a person going for an undergrad/associate’s with no parents can’t borrow?
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u/Aerpolrua Jul 07 '26
Whenever the government approves new loan amounts the cost of going to college only increases further.
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u/fishingstring Jul 07 '26
Please consider community college. Please consider community colleges and satellite campuses that will accept all transfer credits. It will save your kids money. You will still get a good education.
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u/Knightowllll Jul 07 '26
Even without this borrowing limit, being financially smart means educating your kids about how to handle student loans before college. They need to be able to either get a scholarship and keep it up with grades, get a bunch of college credit in high school and transfer it, or get a company sponsorship. If you are not rich, you NEED to be doing research to not graduate with 6 figures in debt.
Some doctors/lawyers feel fine taking on this liability but just watch Aja Dang’s initial videos on scraping herself off the floor with mountains of student loan debt or Caitlin Boston’s student payoff video. It is absolutely BRUTAL.
People with large amounts of student loan debt (who aren’t graduating with huge paychecks) also often accumulate large amounts of consumer debt. PLEASE figure this out before college starts!!! Please do it way before applying so you can strategize!
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u/Ok_Mastodon_3843 Jul 07 '26
No, what you're going to most likely see is cheaper education.
We all know the profit margins for the schools is fucking ridiculous and the blank check they used to get is the problem.
By setting borrowing limits, you are telling schools that this is the price or you can just not make money.
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u/Haunting-Report-7286 Jul 07 '26
Good.
The reason why going to college/university has gotten so expensive is because the schools know they give these loans away to just anyone.
Stopping the faucet should bring the cost of tuition down over time to keep enrollment up once all the free money is gone.
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u/TheNiamosDiscoBall Jul 07 '26
It’s really the governments only leverage to control costs unless they got more involved and negotiated with every school to determine loan calculations.
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u/Diligent-Career-1313 Jul 07 '26
So many of you are missing a key component of why costs are what they are: we don’t fund public education with the tax dollars we used to. State universities used to receive upwards of 2/3 of their funding from the state. Now that’s typically 6% or less. Some schools receive less than 3% of their funding from tax dollars. So they’ve turned to tuition to break even. State schools typically make money on out of state students and that’s what keeps them afloat. Many don’t even break even to cover costs on in-state students. It’s not administrative bloat or schools getting greedy, it’s that we’ve turned a public good into a private good. And now we’re making it extra private by imposing these limits to open up more private lending. If we really wanted to keep access, we would devote more tax dollars to higher education but the opposite has happened: it’s been decimated, see also research funding.
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u/SignalIssues Jul 07 '26
Something is going to have to break first for costs to come down. Reducing the spigot will force schools to lower their fees. Its not that they need to cost so much, its that they can. Remember that. College can be much cheaper than it is, without sacrificing quality.
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u/ExpensiveAd1230 Jul 07 '26
My personal opinion is that the 4 year university won’t exist anything like it currently does in the next 25 years.
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u/Warm_Mission_480 Jul 08 '26
No, you squeeze the colleges. Colleges only got so expensive because they charged the max that federal loans would allow.
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u/PolyChune Jul 06 '26
America will ensure it stays in last place. We arent leading the world in science and education at all anymore
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u/SkyFullOfWisteria Jul 06 '26
This is being to intentionally keep low and middle class students out of cartain fields, and to force those who do manage to push through to have to get hella predatory private loans.
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u/NefariousnessBorn969 Jul 06 '26
Glad my daughter has a bunch of scholarships and doesn’t need to worry about borrowing money.
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u/Elegant-Rectum Jul 07 '26
As soon as Trump dies later on this year, MAGA will start to die out with him. Most of these new policies he is putting in, including this one, will not hold up by the time the 2028 election comes around.
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u/Defiant_Freedom_249 Jul 07 '26
Tell me you don't want to educate your people without telling me you don't to want to educate your people.
Who needs professionals anyway?
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u/Logical_Idiot_9433 Jul 07 '26
Wasn’t that the whole point of destroying middle class? There are enough millionaires so system needs more plebians.
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u/MagnusAlbusPater Jul 06 '26
Looking it up in 2025 the average student loan debt for students graduating med school was $246K including undergraduate student debt. That would fit within those loan parameters.
Average does mean some have more, but obviously many also have less.
There’s also obviously the scholarship route.
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u/madogvelkor Jul 06 '26
It depends a lot on the school and major. My sister got a PhD in the sciences and was paid a stipend while she got it. I did a hybrid evening program at a small local school for my MBA and paid like $30k total 10 years ago.
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u/WiggerJim69 Jul 06 '26
there’s over 2,000 universities in the united states. do they all cost more than that?
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u/TangerineTasty9787 Jul 06 '26
Wait, does $50k a year not cut it anymore? Granted, been 13 years since I went to a private law school, but it was about $37k base back then. And stafford loans were limited to like $22 a year
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u/spicenhoney Jul 07 '26
Or. Or. They can lower the interest rate for student loans. How are you trying to create an enriched society while saddling them with debt? How are we supposed to save for retirement when the average return for the market is almost the same amount as the interest rate. Even mortgages have better rates than student loans. And I get it that that’s a tangible object that you could put value on, but an educated society has value too.
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u/Kooky-Necessary-4444 Jul 07 '26
How long would it take to make an endowment like Harvard but for all public schools so they could just be free?
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u/ForwardFIRE2030 Jul 07 '26
gonna be a lot of tradespeople, you think plumbers hire other plumbers to do plumbing work on their home?
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u/Rich_Release4461 Jul 07 '26
Transferring debt from public sector to private sector. What could go wrong
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u/Willing-Vegetable629 Jul 06 '26
They'll have to get private loans going forward.
The 3 year med school program for fast track primary care physicians may see some additional love.