While President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is packed with controversial, debt-increasing policies, one lesser-known provision may make considerable inroads to correcting a decades-long student loan policy that has driven expensive programs and large debt burdens for students.
The House version of the bill eliminates the Graduate PLUS loan program, which allows graduate students to borrow an unlimited sum of money from the government to pay for school. The program was created in 2006 and, according to a 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, grad school net prices increased by an average of 64 cents per $1 of increased student borrowing in the years directly after the change
"The federal government allows graduate students to borrow unlimited amounts while imposing few controls on the quality of the programs financed," researchers Jason Delisle and Preston Cooper wrote in a 2021 National Affairs article. "The result has been a proliferation of expensive but questionable graduate programs."
