Negotiations were held in-person for one week at the beginning of October and a second week in November.
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A very limited number of degree programs would have access to the highest level of loans under a new set of regulations that the Department of Education and its negotiating committee signed off on Thursday.
The regulations, written in response to the loan caps of Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allow students in programs that qualify as professional to take out up to $200,000. Meanwhile, graduate students will only be able to take out up to $100,000.
What was up for debate throughout the two-week negotiation process was which degree programs qualify for which level of loans.
And while Thursday’s definition of professional programs was slightly more inclusive than the department’s original suggestion—a list of 10 degrees, including medicine, law, dentistry and a masters of divinity—they are not as expansive as a third proposal put forward by Alex Holt, the committee member representing taxpayers and public interest.
The final definition limits professional programs to the original 10 programs, a doctorate in clinical psychology, and a handful of other doctorate programs that fall within the same four-digit CIP codes. By comparison, Holt’s plan would have included any program that is 80 credit hours long, regardless of whether it was a master’s or doctorate degree, so long as it fell within the same two-digit CIP code. (A CIP code, otherwise known as the Classification of Instructional Programs, is part of an organizational system used by ED to group similar academic programs.)
On Thursday, before the committee’s final consensus vote, department officials explained to committee members that if they did not agree to their definition of a professional degree, they could lose out on other “concessions” they had won from the department. Without consensus, the department would legally be free to rewrite any aspect of the proposal prior to releasing it for public comment. (The proposal that reached consensus will still be subject to public comment.)
“I also would like to remind everyone of numerous things that we have chosen to do in these negotiations that you requested for us to do,” said Tamy Abernathy, the department’s negotiator, before listing a slew of other changes the department made concerning the transition to new loan repayment plans and how to grandfather in existing borrowers to new loan policies.
Under Secretary Nicolas Kent noted before the vote that the proposal was “not a perfect definition, but … a perfect definition for the purposes of consensus.”
“We recognize that not every stakeholder group will be thrilled about our proposal,” Kent said. “But I want to remind everybody what consensus means, and that means that if you all agree, or can live with it—because we don’t have to love it—that we will take that regulatory language and put it into the notice of proposal.”
Multiple committee members told Inside Higher Ed they agreed with Kent’s evaluation of what it took to reach a compromise.
Kent closed the meeting by noting that “because we’ve reached consensus, negotiators and their employers will refrain from commenting negatively … as they agreed to do.”
