Kate Wood

speaker

431 appearances 7 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 13 Aug

Kate Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 4.

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NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast · Impulse Spending Fixes and PSLF Choices When You’re in Grad School · 2 Feb 2026 podcast

In a nutshell, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act got rid of graduate plus loans.

And if you're like, what is a graduate plus loan?

Basically, if you're currently in grad school or if you've had federal student loans to go to grad school, those were the loans you had.

It's just that's what the graduate student loans were called.

So with Grad Plus loans, you could borrow up to your program's cost of attendance.

So whatever it costs to go, inclusive of like tuition, fees, the estimates for, you know, lab fees, other costs like that, you could borrow up to that.

Now, because of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, starting for new graduate loans next year, they are going to be subject to borrowing caps.

So most graduate degrees, including controversially nursing, are subject to the lower cap, which is $20,500 per year or $100,000 lifetime.

The areas that have been designated as professional degrees have higher caps, $50,000 a year or $200,000 lifetime.

This has been controversial since day one.

Tuition is really high.

We know this.

The median cost for four years of med school for students who graduated this past spring, for example, is nearly $300,000 for public universities and over $400,000 for private.

That's data from the American Association of Medical Colleges.

The median debt that folks are taking on, $200,000 for those who went to a public school, $250,000 for private.

Additionally, with these lending caps, very few degrees qualify as professional degrees.

So on one hand, nurses are excluded, and we have heard a lot about nursing being excluded, but there are only like 44 degrees total that actually qualify as professional.

And the definition that they're drawing on comes from the 1965 Higher Education Act,

So it's not particularly inclusive.

And also, I would say even for fields that are considered professional under this bill, a lot of professional organizations, notably the AMA or the American Medical Association, have complained that these borrowing caps are just too low.

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