Will blue wave wash away financial aid changes for law students?
While some found renewed hopes for student borrowing after the Nov. 3 midterm elections shifted control of Congress to the Democrats, many in legal education say change might be slow to come, especially while Donald Trump is president.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, higher education, including student loans, has been hit by new regulations. That includes passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which killed Grad PLUS loans (which had no borrowing limits) and capped unsubsidized federal loans for “professional” advanced degrees at $50,000 annually for new graduate students enrolling after July 1.
“There will undoubtedly be an effort by higher education generally to revisit the recent changes to the federal aid program imposed by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” says Anthony W. Crowell, dean and president of New York Law School. “For law and other graduate schools, revisiting the loan caps will be a key priority.”
But others contacted by the ABA Journal note that relaxing the financial aid changes could take time.
“There’s real hope for future students,” says Stephen Brown, Fordham Law School’s assistant dean of enrollment. “Current students, I’m not as excited for.”
Any change to the student loan cap would need a new law signed by the president, “which is probably not going to happen,” says Megan Glinski, the Law School Admission Council’s manager of financial aid education.
Nancy Conneely, the AccessLex Institute’s policy vice president, agrees.
“It does seem unlikely that President Trump would want to roll back the changes that he made in his signature legislative achievement,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean he won’t partner with Democrats on other things.”
Those other options could include refining the definition of a “professional degree” in a way that would suspend aid limits for law students.
A wording tweak would “make implementation more aligned to what the law says,” Conneely adds. “But it would still need presidential approval.”
Others say loan forgiveness could reenter the discussion, but some note that priority of President Joe Biden’s administration didn’t have enough support back then and was later struck down by the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“It’s an expensive policy, and many Democrats would rather invest that money on the front end in programs like the Pell Grant to help people get into college and pay for college as opposed to doing it on the back end,” Conneely says.
Average total law school costs have hit $198,788, according to the Education Data Initiative.
Meanwhile, those interviewed by the Journal agree law schools need to continue offering need-based aid. “If we see a change in the loan caps, it’s going to be a long time before that happens,” Brown says. “Until then, schools do need to continue to provide aid.”
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