The Reimagining and Improving Student Education (RISE) Negotiated Rulemaking and Social Work: How Changes to Federal Loans Undermine the Profession, the Social Safety Net, and Access to Care

In November 2025, the U.S. Department of Education’s Reimagining and Improving Student Education (RISE) committee concluded negotiated rulemaking on the provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) on federal student loans. As proposed in the OBBBA, federal graduate student loan lending and funding were fundamentally reshaped and in doing so, places the social work profession and workforce pipeline at real risk. The RISE committee created two tiers of borrowing and imposed new borrowing limits for social workers, among other master’s-level professions. Not only would this ruling eliminate graduate PLUS loans (which allow individuals to borrow up to the total cost of tuition), but it also sets new limits of $20,500/year with a $100,000 aggregate cap for graduate students and $50,000/year with a $200,000 cap for professional students (National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators [NASFAA], 2025; U.S. Department of Education, 2025). As currently designed, future social work graduate students would be able to borrow no more than $20,500 from the federal government per year and would need to rely on more costly private loans to fill the gap. Social work is one of many critical health professions left out in the rulemaking along with advanced practice nurses, marriage and family therapists, and public health and other allied health professionals. Additionally, new lifetime caps were put in place so that an individual who borrowed heavily during undergraduate studies would be limited in financial federal aid to support graduate school.