Summary: New caps on federal student loans, passed by Congress this summer and taking effect in the 2026-27 year, will have especially strong effects on certain corners of higher education. These tables show which colleges and programs are poised to be most impacted.
Under H.R.1, new caps on federal student loans will reshape college students’ educational journeys. Currently-enrolled students are grandfathered into the old system, yet the caps are already changing families’ decisionmaking, including those with children in high school.
Loan caps are a complex policy: they’re not inherently bad, but their implementation matters. Smart analysis has argued for caps on Parent PLUS and Grad PLUS but, in doing so, emphasized that lawmakers should cushion the caps’ blow for vulnerable populations. The reconciliation law caps Parent PLUS loans and graduate loans without providing any assistance for the impacted colleges or students.
Certain corners of higher education will see outsized shares hit the caps. Since Congress passed the bill, colleges have surely conducted their own internal analyses project how many future students would hit the caps. While those examinations tend to be kept private, existing public data offer a window into which colleges have the most at stake. The following tables offer evidence showing which colleges and programs that will likely see the highest shares of students hit the new caps.
Every year, half a million parents borrow Parent PLUS loans to pay for a dependent child’s undergraduate education; previously, they could borrow up to the cost of attendance, as many years as was necessary. The law sets a new lifetime cap of $65,000 per student, alongside a $20,000 annual cap.
Public data in the College Scorecard provides the median amount borrowed by those receiving Parent PLUS, with medians specifically for completers (that is, a student who graduates). Medians don’t tell us all we’d like to know about the distribution of loans, but if a college’s median is north of $65,000, it means more than half of borrowers exceed the cap. That college would be especially vulnerable to its students facing disruption. Not many colleges fall into that “red zone,” but it’s worth understanding which ones do.
Because of inflation in the years since the students in the median debt cohort graduates, colleges whose median is near the threshold of $65,000 should also be concerned. The real value of $65,000 today equaled roughly $54,000 in the years reflected by the data, so colleges with medians above that bound are included.1
Table 1, below, lists the colleges with a sizable number of Parent PLUS recipients2 and a Parent PLUS median above or near the cap. In total, 69 institutions made this unenviable list.
Public colleges have seen major growth in Parent PLUS borrowing in recent years, but colleges in the “red zone” are all private.
A close look at Table 1 shows that particular types of colleges are over-represented among those in the “red zone.” Three groups of institutions that are over-represented in Table 1 are Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), religiously-affiliated colleges, and arts colleges. The following three tables provide the median Parent PLUS amounts among completers at these groups of schools.
Table 2, below, shows that, at five HBCUs, most Parent PLUS recipients will hit the $65,000 cap. And at all of these five HBCUs, at least a quarter of undergraduates receive Parent PLUS, and in the case of Clark Atlanta University, more than half do. In other words, more than one-quarter of Clark Atlanta’s students could hit the cap.
Table 3, below, shows that, at 20 religiously-affiliated colleges, most Parent PLUS recipients will hit the $65,000 cap. While smaller shares of undergraduates receive Parent PLUS at these colleges compared to the HBCUs in Table 2, these still represent significant chunks of their enrollment.
Finally, more than a dozen arts colleges show median Parent PLUS borrowing amounts above the cap, including dramatic arts schools and design schools.
It is incumbent for lawmakers to consider why these institutions have seen high Parent PLUS borrowing amounts. HBCUs, religiously-affiliated colleges, and arts colleges all offer a sense of belonging that can be hard to replicate at other colleges. The fact that parents are willing to borrow such high amounts to send their children there speaks to their distinct appeal, and it raises the question of whether that can be replicated elsewhere for those who will have to enroll somewhere else due to the loan caps.
The new law establishes aggregate borrowing caps of $200,000 for professional graduate programs and $100,000 for all other graduate programs. A forthcoming Education Department Negotiated Rulemaking will regulate what counts as a progressional program; since no rules have been finalized, this analysis uses language from the Department’s discussion papers provided to negotiators to assign each program a limit.
Much like it offers data on Parent PLUS, the College Scorecard also provides data on graduate loans, including Stafford graduate loans and Grad PLUS. And while roughly 4 percent of undergraduates receive Parent PLUS,3 nearly 40 percent of graduate students receive graduate loans, making for a much larger portion of their enrollment.4
Table 5, below, shows the median debt among those who complete professional graduate programs.5 In total, 190 professional programs show the median student above or near the $200,000 cap.
As a scan of Table 5 shows, the median student at many dentistry programs is above the cap. Of the top 30 programs by highest debt at completion, 26 are dentistry programs. Table 6, below, shows all dentistry programs with medians above the cap. A few have a median that’s more than double the $200,000 cap.
Doctor of medicine (M.D.) programs also rank high. Table 7, below, shows the 78 M.D. programs with a median amount above or near the cap. Two out of every three of these are at public universities.6
Given the vital social need for doctors and dentists, the fact that so many of these programs’ students will hit loan caps raises concerns not just for these students but for all of us who depend on them for our health and wellbeing.
Unlike professional programs, non-professional graduate programs are subject to a lifetime limit of $100,000 in graduate loans under the new law.7 (This is, of course, a misnomer: many non-professional programs educate people for professional careers.)
Table 8, below, lists the non-professional programs where the median graduate loan borrower is above or near the $100,000 cap. A staggering number of programs, 450, qualify for the list.
Question for readers: Should we exclude high-debt certificates? I strongly suspect these are dual-credential programs.
Certain fields are over-represented in Table 8, including allied health, psychology, and physical therapy.
Allied health programs include a broad array of health professions that support doctors and nurses, handling diagnostics, administering anesthetics, providing technological support and emergency medical services, and more. Table 9, below, lists the 146 allied health programs where the median graduate loan borrower is near or exceeds the cap.
Physical therapy programs can be included in allied health, but they also rank high in their own right, under the field of rehabilitation and therapeutic professions. Table 10, below, lists the 71 physical therapy programs where the median graduate loan borrower is near or exceeds the cap.
Psychology programs are also heavily represented near the top in Table 8. Below, Table 11 lists the 31 psychology programs where the median graduate loan borrower is near or exceeds the cap.
The fact that these are all medical fields raise the question of what should count as a professional program, a classification that would raise the cap to $200,000. The Department of Education has not yet signaled an interest in expanding the list of programs deemed professional, but colleges must wait on their final rule to know for sure.
By cutting off a student’s loan access, the loan caps will make a student find alternative financing or else unenroll. Most students will turn to the private loan market. How will they then fare? It depends on a couple of factors.
Federal loan limits give the private market a win-win. Lenders can give credit to students who they expect will repay their loans with interest, and they can choose not to lend to anyone else. As TCF has documented, low-income students may be denied private loans simply due to their co-signers’ credit scores, regardless of their academic potential. While the College Scorecard does not contain information about the credit scores of students’ families, it does tell us about the number of federal loan recipients who also received Pell Grants, which is the best available proxy for low-income status.
Another factor is the student’s expected income. If a lender feels confident that a student’s income will be high by virtue of their field of study or the particular institution that they attend, then their chances of receiving the private loan are likely higher.
Having identified the groups of colleges and programs where high shares of students may hit the caps, we can then ask whether their students disproportionately come from low-income families and whether their post-graduation earnings rates are high. Table 13 provides these measures for the groups of colleges that will be particularly affected by Parent PLUS loan caps, and nationwide figures for comparison.
This document has identified eight groups of institutions and programs that are especially exposed to the risk of loan caps. They do not represent all of higher education, and many students who are not enrolled at these colleges and programs will hit the caps. These tables also do not address the annual loan limits imposed by the new law, which may have different impacts than the lifetime limits.
But, no doubt, the eight groups identified here are each important to various parts of the economy and to many American communities, and they have the most to lose due to the caps. The analysis underscores several key questions for policy and stakeholders:
For the colleges and programs listed in these tables, these questions are of great urgency.
The medians reflect a pooled cohort of students who graduated in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 award year, a period that ended June 2021. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $65,000 in August 2025 is equivalent to $54,511 in June 2021. Although higher education costs rise at different rates than CPI, for simplicity we will use $54,511 as the lower bound of the “red zone.”↩︎
Defined as at least 10 percent of students and at least 50 students in the debt measurement cohort.↩︎
Source: National Postsecondary Student Aid Study 2019-20 via NCES Datalab, table retrieval code cuslhu.↩︎
Source: National Postsecondary Student Aid Study 2019-20 via NCES Datalab, table retrieval code iwkyba.↩︎
The medians reflect a pooled cohort of students who graduated in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 award year, a period that ended June 2021. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $200,000 in August 2025 is equivalent to $167,726 in June 2021. Although higher education costs rise at different rates than CPI, for simplicity we will use $167,726 as the lower bound of the “red zone.”↩︎
Specifically, 52 programs out of 78.↩︎
The medians reflect a pooled cohort of students who graduated in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 award year, a period that ended June 2021. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $100,000 in August 2025 is equivalent to $83,863 in June 2021. Although higher education costs rise at different rates than CPI, for simplicity we will use $83,863 as the lower bound of the “red zone.”↩︎
And private lenders are extremely unlikely to include forgiveness provisions, similar to the federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, that would change the profit equation.↩︎