Marshall Biven, a second-year medical student at Creighton University, said he’ll be $400,000 in debt with federal loans by the time he graduates.
Although his loans will not be affected by a new $200,000 cap on professional degrees, he’s worried about how it could impact future medical students.
Biven said that with less access to federal loans that have interest rates of around 7%-8%, students will have to turn to private loans that have interest rates of 17% or more, leading to more debt.
“Some of them will never be able to pay off those loans, even if they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Biven said. “They will have this massive piano hanging over them this whole time, getting ready to drop, and they’re gonna have to just constantly be thinking about that, and that doesn’t make for good medicine. Before Congress passed the bill, there was no cap on the amount of federal loans students could have.”
Biven gathered over 500 signatures from students studying health careers, all opposing the new cap along with other cuts in the bill to Medicaid, Medicare and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
“I think that speaks to how unpopular that this bill is, and how afraid people are for their friends and their family members, or even for their cousins and brothers and sisters that want to apply to school,” Biven said. “People are afraid that they won’t be able to pursue this lifelong dream of getting a health care education, getting a legal education.”
Biven said he’s worried the limit will deter students from applying to medical school. It goes into effect July 1, 2026.
“People that come from lower-income areas or middle-income areas have a wealth of experience that makes them quality doctors,” he said. “People from very affluent areas sometimes can be quite out of touch… We need people from those areas, from those income brackets, to make good doctors.”
Dr. Robert Dunlay, the dean of medicine at Creighton University, said students with a passion for studying medicine will find a way to still go to school, but it may impact what field they decide to practice in.
“If you have a huge debt load, is going into a primary care field where, historically, people don’t make as much money as specialists do — is that a viable career pathway for you? I would say yes, it is over the course of a lifetime, but you are going to be managing a debt load with a lower income than somebody who goes into a higher-paid specialty,” he said.
He added that students may also change where they go to school based on how much debt they will have. Private schools, like Creighton, tend to cost more than public schools. Dunlay said a Creighton University student spends about $380,000 over four years for medical school with an average debt load of $260,000.
“For some students that might choose to go to a private medical school because it offers something different that they find particularly appealing, that decision might be very difficult if they’re having a hard time getting a loan, and they have to pay a higher interest rate for the money that they’re borrowing,” Dunlay said.
When Dunlay was in medical school, there were no federal loans available. He said he had to take out private loans that he finally paid off in his 40s.
Both Nebraska senators and all three representatives voted in favor of the bill each time it came across their desks. Sen. Pete Ricketts said he believes the bill protects students.
“The idea is to make sure that students aren’t getting into too much debt and not able to pay it back,” Ricketts said. “I would say that the federal government’s got limited resources, and so we have to make sure that those resources are divvied up appropriately, or at least evenly, giving everybody a chance to be able to access that. That’s why we put limits on this so that everybody has the opportunity, and that some people aren’t being shut out because we don’t have the opportunity to be able to offer those.”
Nebraska Public Media News reached out to other officials for comment but did not get a response.
Biven, the Creighton medical student, said he received confirmation that Ricketts, Sen. Deb Fischer and Rep. Don Bacon all saw the petition ahead of their prospective votes.
“When health care professionals and patients are worrying more about money than practicing care and healing people and people getting healthy,” Biven said. “I think we have a serious problem,”
Biven said when he is done with medical school, he will specialize in what interests him the most, which currently is either cardiology or psychiatry. Biven’s reasoning for going to medical school was to be able to advocate for patients and improve the health care system, particularly when it comes to healthcare access. In this same way, he hopes future health care students will be able to continue having access to their education.
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