By Maria Carrasco, NASFAA Staff Reporter

A new NASFAA thought force aims to bring together a community of graduate and professional (graduate/professional) financial aid administrators to engage in conversations about graduate and professional student borrowing in the context of the current political climate.

A key issue some Congressional lawmakers have focused on recently is graduate student loan borrowing. For example, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, introduced earlier this year the College Cost Reduction Act, a bill that would terminate the Graduate PLUS and Parent PLUS loan programs.

Some reports even suggest that if the trajectory of student loan borrowing continues, graduate student loans could soon be a majority of the entire federal student loan portfolio.

NASFAA’s Graduate/Professional Borrowing Thought Force will discuss these issues, and more, and from there, will compose and suggest guiding advocacy and policy principles for NASFAA on graduate and professional student loan borrowing.

The thought force is composed of 11 members, and is led by chair Emily Osborn, FAAC®, director of the Chicago Office of Financial Aid for Northwestern University. The thought force began its work this month, with an end date expected in February next year.

Along with creating a set of advocacy and policy principles for NASFAA, the thought force will also provide recommendations to NASFAA about the association’s engagement with the graduate/professional community – such as where NASFAA could be doing more, how NASFAA should develop its policy positions, and what could be most impactful.

“A lot of the bill proposals that we see coming out of both sides of Congress focus on graduate/professional borrowing levels, and in some cases excluding graduate/professional students from some benefits that they already have access to, or significantly reducing the aggregate limits of graduate/professional loans,” Emily said. “We would like to come up with a policy position for NASFAA that is backed by the graduate/professional community for when proposals come out.”

Read on to find out more about Emily’s mission for the Graduate/Professional Borrowing Thought Force.

What is the issue this thought force is trying to address?

It has been several years since NASFAA has gotten anyone together to talk about the policy and advocacy initiatives from NASFAA for our graduate and professional students. The last time was about 10 years ago. We really wanted this thought force to come together to find a way to work within the graduate/professional community and with NASFAA to structure new suggestions around policy and advocacy focusing on graduate and professional funding, and specifically graduate/professional loan borrowing.

The hope here is that we're going to hear from a wide variety of financial aid professionals, who work across a number of different sectors and departments. From there, we are going to take those thoughts, and any data or recent studies, to help us frame some positions around graduate student borrowing that can hopefully help and maybe even offer an alternative to what we’re seeing from Congress.

What are you hoping the thought force accomplishes?

I really hope that at the end of this thought force we have a good, strong recommendation for the NASFAA Board around policy proposals impacting graduate and professional students.

There are positions that are already out there that impact all student loan borrowers, most specifically eliminating loan origination fees, that obviously impact our population a lot more than it impacts the undergraduate population – just because of Grad PLUS loans and the higher origination fees on those loans. Our students are paying more in loan origination fees in general, but they’re also just incredibly confusing. As we have been saying for several years, this is really more a tax on students than anything else, and the fact that they're borrowing funds that they never see but still have to repay and accrue interest on, confuses many students. We'd like to eliminate origination fees on these loans.

And specifically around graduate/professional students, we’d like to recommend to NASFAA a position on aggregate limits and borrowing limits. Whether that is a lifetime aggregate limit or an increased annual aggregate limit, those will be things that will come out through the discussions with the thought force and what we're looking for input on.

What concerns do you have about graduate and professional student borrowing?

My biggest concern is that I hope graduate/professional borrowing continues through the federal student loan programs. Graduate and professional borrowing has really been a target for a lot of proposals, with either the elimination or reduction in loan amounts, or limiting access to things like Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) or other forgiveness plans for graduate/professional students. That is actually my number one concern, is that our thought force is able to demonstrate why it is so important for graduate/professional students to have access to federal loan funds to finance their education.

From there, I think my other concern is that there is a very small portion of the population that is borrowing incredibly high amounts. We're talking over half a million dollars in loans. Again, this is a small portion of the population, but these are the ones that kind of tend to make the headlines. How do we balance that with a student who legitimately wants to get a master's degree, and then wants to go on and become a doctor, and they're attending a school that doesn't have a lot of institutional loan funding or institutional grant funding? These students are truly paying for these six years of graduate education with loans, and you could see that students get to $500,000 in loans pretty easily.

How do we find that balance? How do we make sure that we're not cutting off access to someone? On the flip side of that, if we lose or have our access to federal funding significantly limited – what is going to be the impact on people being able to go to graduate school? We haven't had to primarily rely on private loans since the Grad PLUS loan was created almost two decades ago.

My concerns are could we see more students being denied for private loans than currently have access to Grad PLUS loans? And would that then have downstream effects, limiting the ability of people to enroll in graduate programs, especially people who are in not the highest paying fields — like social work — or people who are coming from first-generation, lower-income backgrounds, or underrepresented minorities?

Why did you decide to serve on this task force?

I am incredibly passionate about my graduate/professional students. I have worked with graduate and professional students almost my entire career – so almost 30 years. And I have worked with them almost exclusively. I do really see the need for funding for these students, and the benefit of having access to federal funds for people to be able to go on and follow their passions.

One of the things that I've always been passionate about is making sure that when we're thinking about graduate/professional issues, we are not just thinking about what I call the “big three” — the medical school, law school, and business school students. Yes, they're going to come out with high dollars in student loan debt, but a lot of them are going to go into high earning careers.

We have these other programs where the fields require a graduate degree, but there is no grant funding and often very limited institutional funding. Many of those fields tend to be in public serving roles. Whether or not they qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness is another story entirely. As my physical therapy students, for example, could tell you, many of these are in fields that serve a vital need for the public.

For example, a really great example of borrowers with high graduate/professional student loan debt but are serving a population that we really need right now are actually vets. Our veterinarians come out of school with six figures in debt, but they don't typically qualify for PSLF unless they're working at a school or a public rescue.

Publication Date: 11/25/2024

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