The Proposal Isn’t the Problem—The Problem Is Everything Around It

Lex E Santí, LCSW, MFA – Founder, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC

Every few years, the federal government finds a new way to remind us that the “helping professions” aren’t actually meant to be helped. The newest example is the U.S. Department of Education’s proposal to reclassify certain master’s programs — education, nursing, public health, social work — so that they are no longer considered “professional degrees” for federal student loan purposes.

The Department of Education insists this is a harmless definitional change. Their own “Myth vs. Fact” sheet tries to reassure the public that only a small set of degrees will retain the higher graduate loan limit.

But the actual reporting paints a much clearer — and more troubling — picture.

Inside Higher Ed notes that fewer than ten degree types will now qualify as “professional,” which significantly lowers borrowing caps for fields like teaching, nursing, and social work — fields with some of the lowest median earnings in the country.

NBC Washington reports that the Trump administration specifically proposed removing degrees like MSW, MSEd, MSN, and public health from the professional category, creating a gap between the cost of training and the federal support available to finance it.

But here’s the truth:

The borrowing limits aren’t the real crisis. They are simply the part easiest to observe.

I spent fourteen years doing the work society tells you is noble and necessary — nonprofit work, universities, crisis intervention, mental health care. And across that time, my student loan balance quietly ballooned into $503,000. I never borrowed that much. Not even close.

Here is what I actually borrowed:

• $23,000 for my BA

• $32,000 for my MFA

• About $200,000 for my MSW at Washington University in St. Louis

A total somewhere around $255,000.

The remaining quarter million? That was interest — compounding, capitalizing, snowballing — the inevitable mathematics of a system that gives you a shovel and tells you to dig your way out of a sinkhole. I'm still unclear. The final tally was mindblowing when it was paid off.

And I want to be extremely clear about this: I paid what I could. Every Month. Every year. I am very thankful for the PSLF program for not allowing me to live in indentured servitude for the rest of my life. At 50 I am now dreaming of the rest of my life, what else I want to do.

This is the part policymakers never want to say out loud:

You cannot force people into high-cost degrees and then pay them wages that guarantee they will drown.

Let’s talk about social work specifically — because no field embodies this mismatch more painfully.

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) in a fascinating article which articulates their opposition to these new categories and the trajectory of the MSW field, reports an average MSW debt of around $67,000, with starting salaries around $47,100 — numbers that cannot coexist in a livable equation for long.

This is not unique to social work. Nursing faces similar wage compression. Teaching is in crisis. Public health departments are chronically underfunded.

The American Hospital Association has called current nursing shortages “historic” and linked them to training costs, burnout, and stagnant wages. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics cites the intense recruitment of nurses that needs to replace a generation of nurses aging out of the profession.

And the City and State New York reports nationwide shortages across teaching, nursing, and other public-service fields — a predictable outcome when the pipeline is financially impossible for most Americans to enter.

Meanwhile, universities (including my alma mater, WashU — a place I love) have not been structurally required to justify why an MSW degree there costs $150,000 more than one at SUNY or other public institutions. That part is not in a report — it’s simply my lived experience. But the broader trend of inflated graduate tuition is well documented by the Brookings Institution, which argues that the disconnect between graduate school pricing and graduate wages is a structural flaw in American higher education.

So when the Department of Education proposes that degrees like MSW, MSEd, and MSN — the ones that stabilize society — should no longer count as “professional,” I hear something different.

I hear:

Your work is essential, but not valued.

Your expertise is needed, but not respected.

Your service is noble, but not worth supporting.

And while I do not endorse the administration’s reasoning, I understand the structural pressure behind the move. The cost of these degrees is absurdly out of line with the wages attached to them. Something must change — but reducing access to federal loans is the wrong lever entirely. It will hurt precisely the people who need these careers most:

• First-generation students

• Working-class students

• Immigrant students

• Students without family safety nets

Students--just like me--people who know their life mission is to help others and will be shut out of these fields. They will either turn to predatory private loans or abandon the field altogether.

And then, years from now, we will wonder why America has no teachers.

Why hospitals are understaffed.

Why social workers burn out in two years.

Why public health departments collapse under the weight of the next crisis.

The answer will be simple:

Because we treated the people who keep society functioning as if their work didn’t matter.

The proposal is the symptom.

The wages, the tuition, the cost structure — that is the disease.