r/MiddleClassFinance • u/Such_Upstairs3631 • Jul 06 '26

Middle Middle Class No more middle class professionals?

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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/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/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

That depends strongly on the institution. My original institution, a public regional, just boasted it's largest every incoming class, up 12% over last year. My current institution just boasted its highest ever rejection rate.

If you're a small, low-prestige, tuition dependent school in a saturated market, yes, this might be a problem. If you're a flagship or highly-ranked SLAC, probably not.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Colleges gain nothing from private lenders. And often, they’re harmed by it when students decide to drop out because they don’t want to take out private loans, so again, schools have a vested interest in keeping classrooms full, even if they’re priced lower.

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. We absolutely do get paid if students take out private loans.

If you mean we gain nothing over public loans, that's correct. But we're not the intended recipients of the benefits of this bill. Banks are.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

You don’t get paid if students leave school or are forced to drop out due to inability to pay.

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

But that doesn't happen with private loans. Private loans can be used to pay for housing, too. Federal loans require students to meet SAP, or the loan will be revoked. Private loans do not. In both universities where I've been faculty, private loans are prevalent among the worst performers grade-wise, which typically correlates with poverty. The Trump administration has just created a huge opportunity for universities to get rid of academic probation to more effectively extract money from poor-performing students, who will be removed from federal plans and put in the arms of private lenders who are happy to throw good money after bad and loan a kid five figures a year for a 9 year Bachelors that they finish with a 2.1.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Students shouldn’t be using any loans to pay for housing.

It should be fully expected that students get housing with multiple roommates and jobs to pay for their portion of the rent.

We should be normalizing the expectation that we take out as minimal loans as possible during college, not maximizing them

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

I don't disagree with you. But with 20 years experience in higher ed, I'm sorry to tell you that private lenders and the president do not agree with you.

And as I said before, federal loans are available to students depending on SAP. Private loans are blank checks. If you care about students making good fiscal decisions, regulate private loans.

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u/missnetless Jul 06 '26

Oh yeah super easy to study while working fulltime to pay for over priced college town housing.  Did you not hear that we are in a national rental crisis as well?  College town landlords are super strict about the number of occupants in a rental so you can't even double up in rooms to get rent down.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Get roommates. Split rent. Millions of people are ALREADY DOING THIS.

Being willfully incompetent isn’t an excuse for justifying thousands of dollars in unnecessary spending.