Tiara Moultrie, fellow at the Century Foundation, recently authored a new article that examines how changes to federal student loans for graduate students could impact admissions at HBCU medical schools and force Black medical students to take on private loans.
As part of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in July 2025, the federal government eliminated Direct Graduate PLUS Loans. Before this legislation, nearly half of all medical students used Grad PLUS Loans, borrowing a combined $1 billion every year. Students pursuing graduate education could borrow up to the full cost of attendance.
However, effective July 1, 2026, there will be new annual and aggregate borrowing limits on Direct Loans used for graduate programs. Students pursuing a graduate education can borrow up to $50,000 annually, with a lifetime borrowing cap of $200,000. This is far below what the typical medical student pays to earn their degree. For the medical degree class of 2025, the median cost of attendance was over $280,000 for public medical schools and nearly $400,000 for private medical institutions.
According to Moultrie, this means “medical students will be forced to seek private student loans to make up the difference, or choose not to attend at all.”
Lenders of private loans — which often have fewer repayment, deferment, forbearance, and loan forgiveness options compared to federal loans — base their decisions on factors such as a prospective borrower’s income, debt-to-income ratio, credit score, and payment history, and may deny credit to prospective borrowers who do not meet certain underwriting standards. This could pose a challenge to some Black medical school matriculants; nearly one-quarter of these students hold over $50,000 in premedical school and/or undergraduate education debt. Black medical school students are also more likely than their peers to come from households in which parents earn less than $50,000 annually.
Furthermore, Black medical students at HBCU medical schools generally have a larger debt burden compared to Black students at predominantly White institutions. For example, at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the average debt is nearly $50,000 more than the new federal loan limit. Moultrie notes that this means “entire cohorts [at Meharry] could be left in dire straits if they are unable to access private loans to fill the gap.”
“The new borrowing limits will likely push many more students into the private student market, and prevent other students from pursuing medical school,” Moultrie writes. “Congress did not take steps to address these consequences by allocating support structures to accompany the limits. The result will be decreased access to HBCU medical school programs.”
She continues, “If we’re going to produce the high-skilled health care workforce we need more crucially every day, one that can and will serve every community, then we cannot afford to leave these students and schools without the support they need.”
