Capping Student Loans Won't Destroy Medical Schools
Medical school is so expensive in the first place because of a policy that gives medical students unlimited access to loans.
While President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is packed with controversial, debt-increasing policies, one lesser-known provision may make considerable inroads to correcting a decades-long student loan policy that has driven expensive programs and large debt burdens for students.
The House version of the bill eliminates the Graduate PLUS loan program, which allows graduate students to borrow an unlimited sum of money from the government to pay for school. The program was created in 2006 and, according to a 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, grad school net prices increased by an average of 64 cents per $1 of increased student borrowing in the years directly after the change
"The federal government allows graduate students to borrow unlimited amounts while imposing few controls on the quality of the programs financed," researchers Jason Delisle and Preston Cooper wrote in a 2021 National Affairs article. "The result has been a proliferation of expensive but questionable graduate programs."
The House bill places a $100,000 limit on borrowing for graduate students, with a $150,000 limit for professional programs, and a lifetime cap of $200,000 for all students. That cap, while still allowing for six-figure debt, is substantially lower than the cost paid by many students to attend medical school or law school, meaning that some students will have to turn to the private loan market.
Some journalists are framing this change as a threat to low-income borrowers, focusing on how the program will make it harder to finance a staggeringly expensive education without considering how graduate education got so expensive in the first place.
In a recent article for Politico, journalist Rebecca Carballo lamented that the change could "shatter an everyday profession," writing that "for low-income and first-generation college students with aspirations of becoming physicians, these plans, if enacted, could squash their dreams." In The New York Times, reporter Roni Caryn Rabin wrote that the bill would make "the path to becoming a physician harder even as doctor shortages loom and the American population is graying."
The problem with this framing is that it assumes that the eye-popping sticker price to attend medical school is an unchangeable constant rather than a product of market forces. Placing a cap on graduate student loans wouldn't merely make it harder for students to pay the inflated sticker prices of a graduate degree; it would force colleges to lower their prices once their students no longer have access to an infinite pile of government money.
When you effectively give every prospective medical student a limitless pile of money to draw from, colleges are incentivized to hike costs. If we want to make medical school more affordable, the first step should involve actually incentivizing medical schools to stop overcharging students.
