Dalea Tran has dreamed of law school for years, but she’s never known how she might pay for it.
Unlike many aspiring lawyers, she wouldn’t be following in her parents’ footsteps. An accountant and a hair stylist, they arrived in San Diego with their families as child refugees from Vietnam. Tran, a 19-year-old rising sophomore at the University of California, San Diego, knew if she decided to go to law school, she’d have to work her way through a maze of student loans and financial aid packages.
For people like her, navigating that maze just became far more challenging.
Major changes are coming to higher education in the United States after President Donald Trump signed his major domestic policy bill into law. Among them is an end to Grad PLUS loans, a program that helps people pay for medical school and law school. Since Congress created the loans, direct from the federal government, in 2006, they have covered the full cost of attending graduate and professional school for nearly 2 million students.
Beginning July 1, 2026, that won’t be an option anymore. Trump’s tax and spending law will eliminate the Grad PLUS program for new borrowers (students who take out loans before that date will be grandfathered in for up to three years).
The measure imposes new borrowing caps – $50,000 annually and $200,000 overall – on the amount of federal direct loans students can take out for degrees in law and medicine. And it limits their repayment options after they graduate.
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All those technicalities mean that some students like Tran may have fewer options for law school or medical school – or could be steered down a different career path altogether.
“There’s no way I can graduate early enough to avoid the Grad PLUS change,” she said.
The reforms represent the culmination of years of conservative efforts to rein in student lending. However, there has been bipartisan consensus about the causes of the underlying problem Republicans are trying to solve. Left-leaning groups and policymakers have also been highly critical in recent years of the crippling debt that some graduate programs impose on students.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a doctor from Louisiana and chairman of the Senate education committee, said the new legislation will put a stop to a vicious cycle that has kept college costs too high.
“The increasing availability of federal loans has resulted in skyrocketing tuition prices, trapping students in a cycle of overwhelming debt that they can’t pay back,” he said in a statement to USA TODAY. “By capping inflationary graduate loan programs, we prevent students from overborrowing and put downward pressure on rising college costs.”
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In 2024, the average annual law school tuition at a private university was nearly $60,000, according to American Bar Association data analyzed by the Law School Admission Council. For in-state residents attending public institutions, it was roughly $32,000.
It’s hard to know exactly how the loan limits will impact law schools, said Austen Parrish, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. It’s likely, in his view, that higher-ranked, more expensive schools will enroll a greater number of wealthy students who won’t be as reliant on loans.
Other, less privileged students may have to trade prestige for cost, he said.
“You’re going to see students having to make difficult decisions,” he said.
Medical schools brace for shift
Watching from north-central Montana as Congress passed Trump’s spending bill, Julianna Lindquist was happy she started medical school when she did.
The 23-year-old, originally from Connecticut, is in her second year at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Montana. (Of the two types of medical schools, osteopathic programs are the less-common version; their coursework is similar to that of other medical schools, but instead emphasizes a more holistic approach to patient care.)
This semester, Lindquist is taking out the full amount of Grad PLUS loans she’s eligible for – roughly $24,000.
“I would not be anywhere without student loans,” she said. “There’s financial aid, but it’s not enough.”
About half of all medical students rely on the Grad PLUS program, borrowing more than $1 billion annually, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Graduates of osteopathic schools, the vast majority of which take on Grad PLUS loans, often go on to serve rural areas or become primary care providers.
With federal support disappearing, it’ll be up to the private lending market to make up the difference, said Jane Carreiro, dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at the University of New England in Portland, Maine.
“How are students going to navigate that?” she said. “That’s a question that we’re all asking.”
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why it just got harder to become a doctor or lawyer
