Forty-six-year-old Benjamin Pinckney is a former Army combat medic, a recent graduate of Lehman College in the Bronx, and a man whose life was once saved in an emergency room by a medical assistant. His goal is to work as a PA. He’s not sure he can afford to under a new federal rule that will go into effect on July 1, 2026. He said to ABC News, “If nothing changes, then my dream of being a PA is probably shot.”
That is the kind of narrative that transforms a regulatory dispute into something that people genuinely care about. Early in June, the PA Education Association and the American Academy of Physician Associates filed a joint lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Department of Education. The lawsuit challenged the department’s RISE rule, or Reimagining and Improving Student Education, which caps federal borrowing for Pennsylvania students at $20,500 annually with a $100,000 aggregate limit. Despite the fact that PA programs require clinical training, award master’s degrees, and lead to licensure in all fifty states, the groups contend that this violates the Administrative Procedure Act by excluding them from the “professional degree” category that Congress established and instead classifying them with general graduate students.
The problem is made tangible by the numbers. For PA programs, the median in-state tuition is slightly less than $97,000. Students from out of state must pay more than $101,000. The total cost of attendance frequently surpasses $200,000 when housing, fees, and supplies are taken into account. In the meantime, the rule places PAs, nurses, and teachers on the lower tier and reserves the higher $200,000 borrowing cap for eleven designated professional programs, including medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, and others. What reasoning supports that division is a serious question. By 2034, PA employment is predicted to increase by 20%, and within ten years, PAs and nurse practitioners will account for nearly half of all medical providers in the United States. Limiting the pipeline now seems, at the very least, ill-timed.
The Department of Education has a different perspective. PA programs were never officially categorized as professional degrees, Secretary Linda McMahon told a House committee, claiming the rule merely clarifies an already-existing framework rather than reclassifying anything. Ellen Keast, a department spokesperson, noted that 71% of graduates with debt report postponing significant life milestones, citing two decades of unchecked tuition growth. By restricting the amount that institutions can take out from federal lending, the administration presents the caps as a corrective measure that drives down tuition. That argument might have some merit because universities have long taken advantage of the open spigot of graduate lending. However, the mechanism selected here disproportionately affects students who are already dedicated to professions that clearly benefit society, and this tension is difficult to overlook.
According to a February AAPA survey, one in three pre-PA and current PA students would completely rethink the field if funding were to become unavailable. The $20,500 annual cap was exceeded by 76% of PA student borrowers during the 2023–2024 academic year, indicating that the rule significantly alters who can afford to enter the field. In order to shield students enrolling in the summer and fall 2026 cohorts from the immediate effects, the lawsuit also requests a preliminary injunction.
On similar grounds, Washington, D.C., and twenty-four states have filed their own challenges. In Massachusetts, nursing groups have filed separate lawsuits. It’s possible that the administration misjudged the strength of the opposition or thought that by portraying the caps as a form of fiscal restraint, the criticism would be neutralized. The stakes aren’t abstract for students like Pinckney, who happens to be a Trump supporter and views this as an issue that goes beyond partisanship. They make the difference between starting a career and seeing it fade away.
