Every day since November 2024, I’ve woken up wondering where the wrecking ball will strike next.

In a nation already buckling under humanitarian crises — families torn apart by ICE raids, communities grieving the toll of violence and working families struggling to afford basic necessities — the last thing I ever imagined was witnessing that same wrecking ball crash directly into the nursing profession.

Yet here we are. What feels like a bad dream is, in fact, a stark reality: an administrative decision that prioritizes chaos over stability and ideology over common sense.

The U.S. Department of Education’s recent reclassification of which graduate programs qualify as “professional degrees” for federal student loan purposes delivered a devastating and unexpected blow. While medicine, dentistry, and law remain on the list, graduate nursing programs — including MSN and DNP degrees — along with physician assistant programs, have been stripped of that designation.

The change doesn’t affect nursing’s legal status or clinical scope of practice, but it reshapes how the field is treated in financial-aid policy — and the consequences are enormous. It weakens the educational and financial pathways (already constrained by

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