October 25, 2026 - 9:00 pm

The soaring cost of higher education has been a problem for decades . Congressional Republicans have shown how to fix it.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Because it contained so much — tax cuts, ICE funding and a new school choice program — it’s easy to overlook how it reformed the student loan program. Prior to the legislation, the federal government essentially provided unlimited loans for graduate students through Grad PLUS loans, a program that began in 2006.

That may sound compassionate. It meant graduate students never had to turn down their dream school for financial considerations. And, this line of thinking went, the loans made financial sense because a graduate degree would increase lifetime earnings.

Not surprisingly, the number of students earning master’s degrees has increased over the past 20 years. In the 2005-06 school year, universities awarded around 600,000 master’s degrees .…