On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law. Title VIII, Section 81001 eliminates the Grad PLUS loan program for all new borrowers effective July 1, 2026, and replaces it with hard annual caps: $50,000 for students pursuing federally designated professional degrees, $20,500 for all other graduate programs.
This report quantifies what that change means using actual tuition and cost-of-attendance data scraped from the websites of 1,861 American universities for the 2025–2026 academic year. Three findings define the scale:
- 95.2% of degree programs in our dataset exceed the new caps. Only 350 out of 7,333 program-institution combinations would be fully covered by federal loans alone.
- The aggregate annual funding shortfall amounts to approximately $51.8 billion after accounting for average grants and scholarships reported in federal survey data (NPSAS:20). This figure represents total costs above the new caps across all graduate students, whether or not they currently borrow. At sticker price, the shortfall amounts to $59.9 billion.
- The private lending market cannot close the gap. The entire U.S. private student loan market currently originates roughly $14 billion per year across all borrower types — comparable to the $15 billion in Grad PLUS lending being eliminated.
The elimination of Grad PLUS is the largest change to graduate education financing since the program's creation in 2006. To understand the scope of that change requires understanding how the current system was built.