\n<\/p>\n
Negotiations were held in-person for one week at the beginning of October and a second week in November.<\/p>\n
Pete Kiehart\/The Washington Post\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The regulations, written in response to the loan caps of Congress\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
What was up for debate throughout the two-week negotiation process was which degree programs qualify for which level of loans.<\/p>\n
And while Thursday\u2019s definition of professional programs was slightly more inclusive than the department\u2019s original suggestion\u2014a list of 10 degrees, including medicine, law, dentistry and a masters of divinity\u2014they are not as expansive as a third proposal put forward by Alex Holt, the committee member representing taxpayers and public interest.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s plan would have included any program that is 80 credit hours long, regardless of whether it was a master\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n
On Thursday, before the committee\u2019s 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 \u201cconcessions\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d said Tamy Abernathy, the department\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Under Secretary Nicolas Kent noted before the vote that the proposal was \u201cnot a perfect definition, but\u00a0\u2026 a perfect definition for the purposes of consensus.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe recognize that not every stakeholder group will be thrilled about our proposal,\u201d Kent said. \u201cBut I want to remind everybody what consensus means, and that means that if you all agree, or can live with it\u2014because we don\u2019t have to love it\u2014that we will take that regulatory language and put it into the notice of proposal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Multiple committee members told Inside Higher Ed<\/em> they agreed with Kent\u2019s evaluation of what it took to reach a compromise.<\/p>\n Kent closed the meeting by noting that \u201cbecause we\u2019ve reached consensus, negotiators and their employers will refrain from commenting negatively\u00a0\u2026 as they agreed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Negotiations were held in-person for one week at the beginning of October and a second week in November. Pete Kiehart\/The Washington Post\/Getty Images 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4969,6693,2015,2243],"class_list":{"0":"post-32498","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-caps","9":"tag-consensus","10":"tag-loan","11":"tag-reaches"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}