Students pursuing these 11 degrees will be eligible to take out up to $200K in federal loans under new limits

President Donald Trump and his administration will begin imposing new limits for federal student loans disbursed on or after July 1, 2026.

Undergraduate borrowers will have the same current limit of up to $7,500 a year for dependent students, depending on their class year. But graduate and professional students will see new limits of up to $20,500 per year ($100,000 total) for graduate studies and $50,000 a year ($200,000 total) for professional programs.

Graduate PLUS loans, which previously allowed students to borrow up to their total cost of attendance, will be eliminated.

According to the proposed regulation, a professional degree “signifies both completion of the academic requirements for beginning practice in a given profession and a level of professional skill beyond that normally required for a bachelor’s degree.”

The Department of Education has named 11 degree fields that meet the requirements to be considered professional, and thus eligible for higher loan limits under the new rules:

Pharmacy (Pharm. D.)
Dentistry doctorate (D.D.S. or D.M.S.)
Veterinary medicine (D.V.M.)
Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.)
Law (L.L.B. or J.D.)
Medicine (M.D.)
Optometry (O.D.)
Osteopathic medicine (D.O.)
Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.)
Theology (M.Div., or M.H.L.)
Clinical psychology (Psy.D. or Ph.D.)

The addition of clinical psychology came out of the department’s recent negotiated rulemaking session where stakeholders debated the loan limit rule and how it should be applied.

The department also said programs in at least 44 other fields could qualify if they meet certain criteria, including giving students a “level of professional skill beyond that normally required for a bachelor’s degree,” generally resulting in a doctoral level degree and requiring professional licensure to begin practice.

Potentially eligible programs include a number of other pharmacy degrees, clinical counseling and theological studies. Institutions are responsible for determining whether a program meets the requirements to be considered a professional degree or not, says Sarah Austin, a policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

Professional organizations respond

Some professional organizations have expressed concern over the list of degrees eligible for the $200,000 aggregate federal loan limit and the Department of Education’s definition of professional programs.

“Despite broad recognition of the complexity, rigor, and necessity of post-baccalaureate nursing education, the Department’s proposal defines professional programs so narrowly that nursing, the nation’s largest healthcare profession, remains excluded,” The American Association of Colleges of Nursing said in a press release on Nov. 7. “Should this proposal be finalized, the impact on our already-challenged nursing workforce would be devastating.”

“Declassifying the [Master of Social Work] and [Doctorate of Social Work] degrees will reduce access to affordable social work education, thereby increasing reliance on high-interest private loans,” the National Association of Social Workers’ Florida chapter said in a press release on Nov. 20.

In a fact sheet released on Nov. 24, the Department of Education said, “The definition of a ‘professional degree’ is an internal definition used by the Department to distinguish among programs that qualify for higher loan limits, not a value judgement about the importance of programs. It has no bearing on whether a program is professional in nature or not.”

The intention behind the loan limits is to discourage borrowers from taking on more debt than they will be able to handle and to encourage institutions to rein in tuition costs, the department said.

The loan limit regulation is not final, however. The Department of Education will publish the regulation in its current form in the federal register in the coming months where the public will have the opportunity to give feedback before it becomes final.

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88-year-old Morgan Freeman shares the secrets to his long life and decades-long career

At 88 years old, renowned actor Morgan Freeman is still starring in movies and using his distinctive voice to narrate films. His acting career spans six decades, and he isn’t looking to retire, according to AARP.

Freeman told the nonprofit that he plans to “keep moving.” And he pairs that sentiment with the advice he received from his dear friend and fellow actor, Clint Eastwood.

“There is a saying about old age — ‘Keep moving’ — and what Clint Eastwood, 95, says: ‘Don’t let the old man in,’” Freeman told AARP earlier this month.

“The way to do that is to keep getting up in the morning, keep working out in the gym, keep taking your vitamins, keep taking your prescribed meds, and keep moving. Keep moving. That is the secret to it all.”

And Freeman is doing just that. This year, he starred in the third installment of the “Now You See Me” movie franchise, reprising his role as Thaddeus Bradley.

Common suggestions from centenarians and people over the age of 80 are to stay active and to never retire. Those tips align with the rules of ikigai, a Japanese principle that is often linked to longevity and wellness.

You get the most movement out of golf at my age. It’s a great sport for older adults.

In his free time, much of what Freeman does aligns with his hack for longevity, which is to keep moving. A passion of his is playing golf, and he believes it’s a wonderful sport to keep up with at his age.

“You get the most movement out of golf at my age, mind you,” Freeman said. “It’s walking, stooping, bending, swinging, cussing. It’s a great sport for older adults.”

As Freeman nears 90, his primary concern is if advancing in age will affect his ability to play the sport he loves. “Will I still be playing golf? That’s the question,” he said.

Another important choice that Freeman made throughout his acting career was never letting his accolades get to his head, even after he won an Oscar in 2005. That’s the same advice he has for actors and actresses who aspire to achieve the same today.

“It didn’t change me one whit. I kind of knew early on that I would eventually get one. It didn’t change me. I hope it didn’t change me,” Freeman said.

“Because the only change you can expect after you’ve gotten an Oscar is maybe your price goes up a tiny bit and your job prospects go up a bit. That’s the one thing or two things I guess you could look forward to. Other than that, don’t let your ego get the best of you.”

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Psychologists say this is one of the strongest predictors of a happy relationship—it’s ‘hard to spot’

We’re often inundated with relationship advice that rarely captures the complexity of what actually makes love work.

As a couples counselor with a decade of experience working with couples and individuals trying to find and stay in love, I’ve found that one of the most underrated signs of a healthy and resilient relationship is a concept called “mutual influence.”

Coined by married psychologists Drs. John and Julie Gottman, mutual influence means that you are willing to let your partner’s needs, vulnerabilities, and perspectives shape you, and even change something about your own behavior.

This quality generally only comes into focus during moments of tension or disagreement, not during easy harmony. At the beginning of a relationship, everyone is usually on their best behavior, which can make this valuable green flag hard to spot early on.

Here’s how to identify and develop it in your own relationship.

What mutual influence looks like

In a 2020 study, psychologists followed nearly 320 couples and found that when both partners felt their voice truly mattered and could genuinely impact the other, relationship quality stayed high and emotional security deepened over the years.

Couples who ignored this dynamic stagnated and became more insecure as their satisfaction with their relationship eroded.

When both partners experience mutual influence, the psychologists found that relationships not only feel fairer, but they actually are more stable and loving. Individuals report less anxiety about their partner’s commitment, and small conflicts are less likely to snowball into chronic gridlock.

This is what mutual influence looks like in practice:

Setting your phone aside when your partner says, “I need you to really hear me right now.”
Going a different route on a road trip because your partner feels anxious about traffic, even if you think your way is faster.
Deciding to spend the holidays with their family this year after hearing how much it means to them, even though your tradition was always different.
Choosing to pause a personal project for the evening because your partner asks for some help finishing theirs.
Switching off the lights when they mention they have a headache.
Accepting their feedback about how you speak during disagreements and choosing to change your tone or words, not because you have to, but because you want them to feel safer and closer to you.

Mutual influence isn’t about giving up your identity in your relationship or shelving what you need for the sake of keeping the peace. True openness means maintaining your values, while still making room for your partner’s experience, especially when the two of you don’t see eye-to-eye. You are creating a shared life where both of your voices matter.

How to develop mutual influence in your relationship

Each week, consciously make one accommodation that you know is important to them. This could be a habit of yours, or making room for a preference of theirs. This signals to your partner that you hear them.

So try their restaurant pick, take their suggested route, adjust the thermostat to their ideal temperature. Being flexible in low-stakes moments makes it far easier to access that quality during high-stakes ones.

During conflict, I’m also a big fan of asking the question: “What am I missing that would help this make more sense?” It’s a disarming query because it shows that you’re not fighting to be right, but to better understand what’s going on in your partner’s head.

These are small gestures that might look insignificant from the outside, but over time, they create the sense of being considered, included, and influential, which are the conditions where real intimacy takes root. That is what separates the couples who merely coexist from those who continually grow closer.

Baya Voce is a relationship expert who helps couples come back together after conflict. She holds an MSW from Columbia University. She regularly speaks at SXSW, and her TEDx talk on loneliness has over 5 million views.

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Walmart exec: ‘I’ve never believed in the term work-life balance’—this is the mantra that made her highly successful instead

Work-life balance looks different for different people.

For some, the term can mean not working nights, weekends and holidays. Others may look at it as no text messages and emails about work after 5 p.m., prioritizing self-care in the evening instead. While this divide may give you a sense of happiness and fulfillment, it isn’t always realistic, says Walmart executive vice president and chief people officer Donna Morris.

“I’ve never believed in the term work-life balance,” says Morris, who oversees the experience of over 2.1 million employees. “I call it work-life integration. There are times that your life requires a lot more, and there are times that your work requires a lot more. … I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

When Morris is visiting family, for example, her main focus is on them. But if there’s something at work that needs her attention, she won’t wait until she’s back in the office to do so. Work-life integration helps her stay on top of her work duties while still showing up for herself and the people she loves, she says.

“You might be [at your kid’s] soccer game, but you happen to look at a few emails,” Morris says. Maybe you’re chatting with your boss via text while waiting for an appointment, or tying up a few loose ends at work before you put the kids to bed. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a workaholic who lacks boundaries — rather, you find ways to combine your personal and professional duties that work for you, instead of being strict and inflexible with your time.

Morris’ insight comes as young professionals are demanding more out of work, shaping new professional norms like relaxed dress codes and mental health days. Along with an inadequate salary and burnout, lack of work-life balance is one of the top reasons why Gen Zers would quit a job, according to a 2022 report from Talent LMS, a workplace training company, which surveyed over 1,200 respondents between ages 19 and 25.

The pursuit of work-life balance can also cause mental distress, Jeff Karp, a professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard Medical School and MIT, told CNBC Make It in September 2024.

“We hear these things from others, [like] trust in the process [and] balance is so important, we need more balance, it’s the ultimate goal,” Karp said. “It ends up being very frustrating and can lead to anxiety, because we’re constantly feeling like we’re not in balance. There’s a state we should be in [and] we’re never in that state.”

Of course, sometimes you may actually need a complete reset, shutting off your laptop for a few days and turning your work phone off. But if your boss doesn’t use their vacation time, or is constantly reaching out during your time off, unplugging can feel impossible.

That’s why it’s up to leaders to set the tone for boundaries in the office and what good work-life integration may look like.

“If I never take a holiday, the tone that I set for everybody is, don’t take a holiday — you can’t do that. And I don’t think that that’s right,” says Morris. “As leaders, we have a responsibility to role model what we expect of others.”

“At the end of August, I’m going away [on vacation],” she adds. “And my team will all know, [so] when they’re able to actually go off and do something, they should go off the grid and do it.”

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This 35-year-old American left the U.S. for the U.K. spends $2,532/month

In 2019, Chanel Rivers took a trip to London that would change the entire trajectory of her life.

Born and raised in New York, Rivers, now 35, says she was tired of the dating scene and worrying about her safety in the Big Apple.

She booked a trip to London with a friend and realized how comfortable she felt walking around the city, something she no longer felt in New York.

“I remember just walking around London and being like, ‘I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be.’ It was a feeling that came over me,” Rivers says. “In London, I just feel like my anxiety has lessened a lot, which is great.”

Shortly after Rivers got back to New York, she started figuring out how to return to London permanently, but the Covid-19 pandemic brought her plans to a complete halt. During the pandemic, Rivers met her now fiancé, Martin, an architect from Canada who was living and working in New York.

After four and a half years of dating, Rivers brought up moving to London again to her fiancé. She admits that the feeling of wanting to move didn’t go away, and she didn’t see herself being in New York long-term anymore.

“I considered Canada, and we did look at Vancouver, but it was not city enough for me. Being from New York, I needed a big city. London was always the plan for me in my heart,” she says.

Around the same time that Rivers brought up getting the move to London going, her fiancé’s job offered him a position in their office there. It was something she says was “very serendipitous but meant to be.”

Since Martin was already a U.K. citizen, Rivers only needed to apply for a partner visa, which was approved in March 2024.

Chanel is part of small but growing trend of Americans relocating to the U.K. More than 6,000 U.S. citizens applied to either become British subjects or to live and work in the country indefinitely from March 2024 to March 2025, the most since the U.K.’s Home Office began keeping records in 2004, according to The Guardian.

Hello, London

In October 2024, the couple moved into a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with a private garden in West London without ever seeing it in person. The rent was 2,400 pounds or USD $3,159 when they first moved in and has since increased to 2,515.20 pounds or $3,311, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

The apartment was unfurnished, in a townhouse rather than a larger building, and didn’t have a doorman, unlike the modern one they lived in back in New York City. The couple didn’t ship any of their furniture over because it was too expensive. The first night they spent in the apartment, they slept in sleeping bags on the floor and used their suitcases as a dining table.

“We wanted something with character. We told ourselves we wanted something different when we moved here and we wanted something that felt very London so that we had a different living experience than we did in the U.S.,” Rivers says.

Rivers was able to keep her $120,000 a year job in event planning and marketing through the end of 2024.

After that, she started looking for a position in London, which she says helped her explore the city as she traveled for interviews and worked out of local coffee shops. Rivers says she never had homesickness or regretted the move, but she admits that she was still nervous about being in a new city.

“I was so intimidated by London because it’s so big and I was kind of scared to go out on my own. I don’t know what happened to that brave girl from 2019, but I guess everything just felt so real now, and it was hitting me,” she adds.

One year later and the cost of living in London

Now that Rivers and her fiancé have lived in London for a little over a year, they have settled in nicely, she says. Rivers found a London-based job working as an event planner. Rivers did not want to disclose her salary, but says that although she did take a pay cut, she’s happy with it and spends less money than she did while living in New York.

“I’ve found that I generally spend less now, mostly because I’m not socializing as much as I did in New York. In London, life is a bit quieter but in a good way,” she says. “I still make time to see new friends and meet new people but I go out less. Plus, since I earn less here, I’m more mindful about where my money goes.”

Rivers and her fiancé also split their expenses proportionally based on their incomes.

“My fiancé makes the equivalent of what he made in the U.S., so he’s kind of carrying the team right now, which is great,” she adds.

Rivers’ share of the monthly living expenses breakdown is as follows, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It:

Rent = 1,215 pounds or $1,599
Cellphone = 49.70 pounds or $65
Internet/Wi-Fi = 20 pounds or $26
Water = 59.78 pounds or $79
Electricity = 121 pounds or $159
Groceries = 300 pounds or $395
Transportation = 115 pounds or $151
Amazon Prime = 8.99 pounds or $12
Pet insurance = 25.21 pounds or $33
Apple TV = $12.99

Rivers’ biggest monthly expenses are rent, groceries and electricity, she says. She commutes to the office three times a week and tends to buy lunch on those days.

Since moving to London, Rivers and her fiancé say they have also been able to take advantage of the city’s location by taking local day trips on the train and traveling to Ireland and Mallorca.

“It’s really nice to have easier access to traveling. I feel like in the U.S., you go on a trip once a year and that’s it. It’s nice that we can hop on a train and go to Paris for a night or hop on a plane and go to Spain,” she says. “The traveling is also a big part of why we wanted to move.

Despite it taking a while to get settled, Rivers says she feels they made the right decision.

“I’ve only felt like this is the right path and where I’m supposed to be. Even the mundane things I do here excite me,” she says. “I feel like I’m probably in a honeymoon phase but I feel every day that I made the right choice. I don’t think I see myself living in the U.S. now that I know what it’s like to live a lifestyle outside of that.”

Rivers says moving back to the U.S. probably isn’t in the cards for her, but she could eventually get on board with moving to Canada after living out her London dream for a few more years.

“Canada wasn’t as exciting for where I’m at in life right now. I wanted something a little bit more exciting, like New York, but different. I think when I get older, if we were to move back and we wanted to be closer to family, then Canada would be the place we move to,” she says.

Conversions from British Pounds to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 0.76 pounds to $1 USD on Nov. 11, 2025. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.