Local medical school and nursing school students are facing new challenges to finance their education due to changes in federal student loan limits.
New borrowing limits, which went into effective July 1, cap a medical school student’s federal loan at $50,000 per year, with an aggregate cap of $200,000 and a lifetime cap of $257,000 for undergraduate and medical school combined. That may sound like a lot, but at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield, the estimated price for four years (including tuition, living expenses and other required costs) is $308,394, according to Dr. Haneme Idrizi, associate dean for student affairs.
The Illinois State Medical Society “considers the new borrowing limits to be a major blow in the effort to build a robust pathway for physician training,” said ISMS President Dr. Tripti Kataria, a Chicago anesthesiologist. Those limits “likely cover less than two-thirds the cost of attendance. For some private medical schools, that limit would cover less than half the cost — and that doesn’t include non-tuition expenses like room and board.”
At SIU, the Class of 2025 averaged $283,209 in education loans, and 64 percent of the students exceeded the new $200,000 cap (which did not apply to them) by an average of $73,949. “These funding gaps will likely require many students to seek private loans, creating more barriers for applicants with limited access to private financing or other resources,” Idrizi said. She also said it is a significant possibility that some students who begin medical school might not be able to finish, “particularly for students who are unable to secure private loans or other financial resources to fill the funding gap.”
An additional challenge for medical students is the federal elimination as of July 1 of Grad PLUS loans, a federal student loan program that was available to graduate students. Idrizi said 80 percent of SIU’s Class of 2025 utilized this type of loan, with $72,027 being the average amount borrowed. “We anticipate that a similar proportion of students may need to rely on private loans to fill the funding gap,” she said.
Dr. Jerry Kruse, the retiring SIU dean and provost, said that over time the financial stress caused by these changes “may result in fewer medical students from low-income and working-class families, areas of educational disadvantage, marginalized populations and rural communities.”
ISMS’ Kataria expressed the same concern: “The burden will likely fall heaviest on underrepresented and lower-income groups and individuals who would otherwise be interested in pursuing lower-compensated specialties, such as primary care and pediatrics. Medicine could become a career path accessible only to the affluent.”
Effect on nursing schools
The new federal borrowing limits affect only graduate school and professional school students, not undergraduates.
This fall, the University of Illinois Springfield pre-nursing program, which has a partnership with the University of Illinois Chicago School of Nursing for students seeking a bachelor’s degree in nursing, will enroll about 120 undergraduate students, and Lincoln Land Community College’s associate degree nursing program will have about 250 students. Loan limits for those students have not changed, but in recent years, representatives from both schools said, more nursing students and more working nurses are looking to pursue advanced degrees for which there are federal loan limits.
“Knowing they might not be able to afford that (master’s or doctoral) professional-level education could deter some students from going into nursing at all,” said Sara McPherson, director of the Springfield Campus-UIC nursing program. “This is speculative but possible.”
At Lincoln Land, Chief Communications Officer Kyla Kruse said a student can start as a certified nursing assistant, advance to a licensed practical nurse and registered nurse, “and then we’ve seen our alumni continue their education in healthcare to achieve advanced degrees, such as the Doctor of Nursing Practice.”
In the past two years, the ISMS supported three bills in the Illinois General Assembly that would provide state-level grants and other funds for medical students and residents, but none of the legislation passed both chambers.
“ISMS hopes that the federal government reconsiders (its) misguided policy change and restores the availability of federal lending to the next generation of physicians before it is too late,” Kataria said.
Ed Wojcicki has a degree in journalism, worked for print publications for 26 years and now freelances from Springfield.
This article appears in September SBJ 2026.