Opinion: Proposed DOE provisions detrimental to healthcare quality and access. Congress must act

Hartford Courant – Monday, January 26, 2026
By Christopher O’Connor

Christopher O’Connor is chief executive officer of Yale New Haven Health.

Our country needs more nurses. This is not a new perspective, nor is it particularly controversial more than five years into a well-documented national nursing shortage.

Nurses are the backbone of our country’s healthcare system. One of the greatest privileges of my job at the helm of Connecticut’s largest health system is hearing the moving stories of the many nurses who leave a lasting impact on the lives of the patients and families we serve.

Long before I became a healthcare leader, I was the son of a dedicated nurse—and later, I married one. These experiences, both professional and personal, have instilled in me a deep-rooted appreciation of the tremendous skill and commitment required by those in the nursing profession. These experiences have conversely taught me that appreciation alone is not enough to ensure the long-term support of our nursing workforce.

At Yale New Haven Health, we recognize the skills and accomplishments of our nurses by investing in their professional advancement, including providing scholarships to support nurses across our system who wish to pursue advanced nursing degrees. This type of investment in the nursing workforce is one of the most important steps our country’s leaders—both in healthcare organizations and in government—can take to bolster our healthcare system.

Yet instead of helping meet the urgent demand for more nurses, a recently-announced Department of Education initiative would make it more difficult for college graduates to earn a nursing degree.

Announced in November, new provisions from the DOE would limit federal loans for students earning graduate degrees. The provisions provide significantly higher limits for students earning degrees classified as “professional degrees.”

While healthcare positions such as doctors, dentists and pharmacists benefit from the larger cap offered for professional degrees, nursing degrees and advanced practice nursing degrees are excluded. Under the new provisions, those seeking nursing degrees would be eligible for $100,000 in federal student loans toward graduate programs over their lifetime, just half of the $200,000 that would be available to them if nursing was designated as a professional degree. The difference is even more stark when looking at the annual limits; nursing graduate students would be eligible for just $20,500 per year compared to the $50,000 annual limit for professional degrees.

These limits would detrimentally impact the growth of our country’s nursing workforce. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the average annual cost for nursing graduate students in academic year 2019-2020 was just under $30,000 for those seeking a Master’s of Science in Nursing and just under $34,000 for a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree – both well above the annual limit imposed by the proposed provisions.

These limitations significantly impact nurses’ ability to advance within their careers, both in expanding their scope of practice and in advancing their pay scale, disincentivizing those who wish to advance in nursing practice.

And while nursing is the most high-profile field excluded from classification as a professional degree, it is by no means the only area of the healthcare workforce that will suffer as a result of these limits. Other frontline roles such as physician assistants, physical and speech therapists, public health workers and social workers would be impacted by lower caps under the new provisions. Like nurses, these are the individuals that often have the most direct interaction with patients. Anyone who has interacted with these professionals, whether as a patient, caretaker or colleague, can testify to the incredible skill and expertise their work requires – expertise that comes from extensive education and training. Creating additional barriers for students to receive that education will directly impact patients’ access to care in the long-term.

It will also pose long-term consequences for the overall sustainability of our country’s healthcare system, exacerbating our current workforce shortage and undermining years of collaborative efforts by healthcare organizations, universities and government leaders to address this crisis through clinical partnership, pipeline and incentive programs.

If adopted as written, these provisions would undermine efforts by health systems like ours that are investing in nurses’ education and leadership, and make it harder for talented college graduates to answer the call to nursing. Congress must press the Department of Education to revise its definition of a professional degree so it fully recognizes nursing and other frontline roles that anchor patient care. The health of our communities, and the strength of our entire healthcare system, depends on it.

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