Benjamin Pinckney, 46, has dreamed of becoming a physician assistant since just after his 20th birthday.
He had been targeted by a drive-by shooter in Jacksonville, Florida, and hospitalized with two gunshot wounds. During his weeklong hospitalization, he said, a physician assistant changed the course of his life by visiting his hospital bed each day and warning him that Black men with gunshot wounds often end up paralyzed — or worse.
“I used to run the streets, you know, on the wrong sides of the track,” Pinckney said. “He made me promise that I would never come into his ER that way again. That was the last conversation we had, right before I was discharged.”
His goal since then has been to become a physician assistant. Pinckney, who spent most of his career working for New York City’s Department of Sanitation and as an Army Reserve medic, recently took a step toward achieving it. In May, he graduated with departmental honors from Lehman College with a Bachelor of Science degree.
After moving from New York to Prince George’s County, Maryland, he’d planned on applying for physician assistant school this year. But now, he’s worried his dream may be thwarted by new student loan rules.
Starting July 1, the amount of money graduate students will be allowed to borrow from the federal government will be capped. The new student loan limits are part of the GOP’s tax-and-spending legislation known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last year.
The caps are intended to curb the cost of higher education and student loan debt, according to the Trump administration.
But critics widely agree the new limits are too low, especially for students allowed to borrow only $20,500 a year in federal loans due to the law’s controversial definition of a “professional degree.” On June 24, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Department of Education from enforcing that definition. Still, for many students, the new caps won’t cover the combined cost of tuition, housing, and living expenses.
This could leave hundreds of thousands of students who borrow money for graduate school each year at the mercy of private lenders with higher interest rates and fewer repayment options.
Some experts and students also worry that the limits will threaten efforts to diversify the healthcare workforce by deterring minorities and people from low-income households from applying to graduate programs. A drop in incoming students could worsen existing rural and primary care shortages, they argue.
Many politicians and loan experts have acknowledged that the cost of higher education needs to be addressed. But the new federal loan limits are “just not going to achieve that goal,” said Todd Pickard, president of the American Academy of Physician Associates, one of several organizations that have sued the Department of Education over the rules.
“It’d be like if you had a hangnail and I cut your whole arm off instead of just taking care of your hangnail,” Pickard said. “The treatment doesn’t match the problem.”
‘A Rock and a Hard Place’
Students working toward what the law describes as “professional degrees” — including trainee doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and chiropractors — will be allowed to borrow up to $200,000 total, and no more than $50,000 a year.
Meanwhile, the median cost of attending a public medical school is nearly $300,000 over four years, while the median cost of a private medical school education exceeds $400,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The caps were set even lower for those pursuing other “graduate” degrees, who face a $100,000 borrowing limit for federal loans over the course of their degree programs. The annual limit for this category of students is only $20,500. Students pursuing physical therapy, physician assistant, and nursing degrees were originally included in this group. But according to new guidance issued by the Department of Education on Monday, some of these students will at least temporarily be able to borrow up to the higher limit, according to The Associated Press.
The Department of Education, which has been sued by clinician trade groups and about two dozen states over the new rules, did not respond to questions for this article.
As the law was written, a physician assistant student who completed their degree within the average two to three years would not have been eligible to borrow the full $100,000. Meanwhile, physician assistants typically start their careers with an average debt of $112,000, meaning some could be forced to finance their education with higher-interest private loans.
“I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place,” said Olivia Trull, 24, who is scheduled to begin the physician assistant program at Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington, this summer. The 28-month program costs $137,000, with about $62,000 in tuition and fees estimated for the first year, she said. That doesn’t include living expenses.
Before the court order, Trull said she qualified for the maximum annual allotment under the new rules of $20,500 in federal loans during her first year of graduate school. The balance would need to be financed through a private lender.
She anticipated she would need up to $100,000 in private loans to finance her graduate degree and would face loan payments of more than $3,000 a month when she was done.
“I have to actually sit down and have a conversation with myself,” Trull said, to consider “if I want to be drowning in debt for the next 10 years of my life.” One private bank offered her a loan with an interest rate of nearly 14%, she said.
Pinckney, who said he finished his undergraduate degree with about $10,000 in federal student loan debt, said some of his friends who have already applied for private student loans have been quoted interest rates as high as 13%. Meanwhile, interest rates for federal loans for graduate students, which are set annually, are currently about 8-9%. Federal loans also offer more flexible repayment options than private loans typically do.
In May, 25 states and the District of Columbia filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Education over the new rules. The complaint described the law’s “professional degree” definition as “arbitrary and capricious.”
In a separate federal lawsuit filed in June, the American Academy of Physician Associates and the PA Education Association alleged that the new rules deny students the loan amounts needed to attend physician assistant schools. They argue that PA students should be able to access the higher loan limits available to students in medical school and other professional degree programs. (While “physician assistant” and “physician associate” typically refer to the same role, the AAPA adopted the title “physician associate” in 2021 because of “concern that ‘assistant’ does not reflect the important role of PAs in delivering high-quality healthcare to patients.”)
Meanwhile, Trump administration officials have contended the cost of graduate school is too high across the board. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, speaking before a House committee in May about the new limits, said, “It is our overall goal to bring down the cost of college and education.”
Indeed, some experts acknowledge that the new limits may be helpful in bringing down costs. The federal Grad PLUS loan program, established by Congress 20 years ago, did not cap the amount graduate students could borrow in federal loans. That program was eliminated in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“There is considerable evidence that people borrowed more than they really needed to go to school,” said Sandy Baum, a higher education economist and a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.
Already, some graduate programs have lowered tuition prices, Baum said. In May, for example, the University of California-Irvine announced it would lower the cost of its MBA programs by tens of thousands of dollars to fall below the new federal lending thresholds.
And yet Baum doesn’t anticipate many other schools will follow suit.
“I don’t think we’re going to see some dramatic decline in prices,” she said. “I think some programs could close down because they can’t manage.”
‘Tears Have Been Shed’
The new lending limits will also disproportionately affect Black students, Baum said, because they have historically borrowed more than white and Hispanic students.
For some students who borrowed money to finance their undergraduate degrees, the new limits will hit especially hard. Under the new rules, they will be subject to a lifetime limit of $257,000 in federal student loans.
“There will be students who can’t enroll,” Baum said.
Andrei Robu, 26, a medical student at the Medical University of South Carolina, leads the Financial Literacy Interest Group on the Charleston campus. He said many of his peers are worried that the lending limits will make the student body less diverse.
He is also concerned that, because the demand for acceptance into medical school is already so high, schools could prioritize entrance for students from wealthy backgrounds and “still fill up their classes.”
“That’s just not what we want in our physician workforce,” said Robu, who isn’t subject to the new rules as a current student. “We want to represent the population of the country at large.”
Jasmine Vasquez, 26, who has been accepted into the physician assistant program at South College in Atlanta, decided to defer her enrollment until 2027, partly to see if her financing options change. She is worried about taking on too much debt from a private bank.
“Tears have been shed multiple times,” said Vasquez, who is due to give birth in September. “It’s nothing that’s within my control.”
Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute for Student Loan Advisors, expects the new rules will force some graduates into bankruptcy when they can’t afford to repay private loans.
First, though, she expects enrollment numbers to drop and some graduate programs to close because they can’t recruit enough students. Completion rates will also drop, she expects, as students run into federal loan limits partway through their degree programs.
Beyond that, she predicts healthcare graduates will seek jobs in high-paying specialties, exacerbating shortages in rural and underserved communities.
“They’re going to go where they can make the most money,” Mayotte said.
Pinckney said he is “not really sure” what the future holds. He paid for most of his undergraduate education by working while he was in school, but that’s typically not possible for full-time physician assistant students.
He has considered applying to a biomedical science graduate program instead, which he estimated would cost about $30,000 — an amount that’s “a lot more doable,” he said. It would allow him to potentially work in a lab or in pharmaceuticals, he said. It’s still aligned with medicine, he said, but it wouldn’t help him realize his goal of working with patients.
“Maybe this thing will blow over,” he said of the new federal loan limits. In the meantime, he’s holding out hope.
“If I can influence one person’s life, that would be my way of paying him forward for what he did,” he said, referring to the physician assistant who inspired him back in 1999. “It’s very hard to pivot from that dream.”
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