WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) introduced bill text for the Senate’s version of a reconciliation package. This comes on the heels of the House passing their reconciliation bill on May 22, 2025. While rejecting a portion of the House’s proposal, the following are the key provisions from the Senate bill for higher education:
- Replaces longstanding, bipartisan designs for income-driven repayment that mitigate student loan default for new borrowers with a complex and untested plan that will leave borrowers stuck choosing between a non-income-based “standard” payment (which would be unaffordable for many) and an income-based payment that would also be unaffordable for many. At the same time, the bill takes away the ability to defer debt in times of economic hardship and unemployment. These changes fuel the “savings” in the bill by raising student loan payments.
- Reverts the critical borrower defense rule to a 2019 version that was rejected by bicameral, bipartisan majorities in 2020 because in many ways that version would serve the interests of fraudulent institutions, rather than the students they defraud.
- Significantly curtails graduate and parent borrowing but rejects the House’s unworkable attempts to limit all borrowing based on median program-level cost of attendance.
- Preserves subsidized loans for undergraduate students.
- Rejects most significant cuts to Pell Grants proposed by the House but also extends the grants to very short term and even unaccredited programs.
- Preserves Gainful Employment and the 90/10 rule and extends a GE-like provision to all postsecondary programs that will be very difficult to model and implement given the gutting of the Department of Education.
Sameer Gadkaree, president of The Institute for College Access & Success, released the following statement:
“The Senate reconciliation bill’s higher education provisions would cause widespread harm to American families by making college more expensive, making student debt much harder to repay, unleashing an avalanche of student loan defaults, and rolling back basic protections for students who are defrauded by their college—all to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.”
“While the Senate has pared back or rejected many of the most harmful changes proposed by the House, the bill still harms the lowest-income loan borrowers and students to pay for tax cuts.
“The proposed overhaul of the student loan repayment system would take the unprecedented step of eliminating existing protections for borrowers. It would implement an overly complex plan that departs from decades of precedent by forcing the lowest-income borrowers to make unaffordable payments and extending the repayment term to 30 years. Taken together, this will likely drive many more borrowers into default, which comes with severe penalties, including the seizure of Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit refunds and wage garnishment.
“While the Senate nixed most of the House’s proposed cuts to the Pell Grant program and averts a looming funding shortfall, it regrettably threatens the program’s long-term stability by extending Pell eligibility to unaccredited programs that are unlikely to pay off for students.
“In addition, the bill’s provisions to protect students from enrolling in programs with meager earnings are an improvement over the complex risk sharing scheme proposed by the House, but they will be impossible to implement without a fully staffed Department of Education that can collect, process, and share reliable data about college graduates outcomes, including graduation, earnings, and debt.
“We urge Congress to reject this bill and work together to advance policy priorities that protect students and borrowers, not harm families.”
