(Washington, D.C.) – In response to the Department of Education’s new RISE Rule, Ethan Rome, National Director of the Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, released the following statement:
“We applaud the coalition of unions including the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, AFT, and NNU for filing a lawsuit this week challenging the Department of Education’s new RISE rule.
The department’s pernicious RISE rule is part of the Trump administration’s continued war on working-class Americans and higher education. It’s scandalous.
The RISE Act codifies a lesser-known part of the Big Ugly Bill that cuts critical higher education student loan programs by “de-professionalizing” various fields like nursing, teaching, architecture, and public health, which will significantly reduce the financial assistance for people pursuing these careers.
This rule will deny low-income and working-class families the opportunity to become nurses, teachers, and social workers by stripping professional status from these and similar professions, and taking away crucial financial aid as a result.
This rule is an attack on these essential professions, as well as an attack on the people who want to pursue them, including students from historically disenfranchised communities, for whom access to higher education has unlocked a pathway to the American Dream.
This will make the higher education affordability crisis worse, full stop. It sends a message to students that their future work is not valued by society, crushing their ambitions while dealing a blow to communities nationwide that depend on the essential services these future professionals offer.”
BACKGROUND on the Department of Education’s awful RISE rule
- The rule follows a law that sets draconian new limits on the amount of federal student loans for graduate education in some of our nation’s most critical and understaffed professions.
- But the rule lawlessly compounds the problem by making many professional workers ineligible for the higher caps the law sets for “professional” students.
- The rule will severely impact degrees in advanced practice nursing, public health, social work, library sciences, and more by deeming these degrees to be “non-professional.”
- That designation will limit federal student loan support, exacerbating the staffing crisis in these public service professions.