Republicans must hate nurses

Pharyngula 2025-11-23

We have preprofessional programs here at UMM, which, if we gave a good goddamn about the opinions ot the Trump administration, we’d have to revise, because they’ve deleted one of our popular majors from the category.

Nursing has been excluded as a “professional degree” by the Trump administration as the Department of Education prepares to make massive cuts to providing student loans.

That’s a surprising absence. If you go to the doctor, you’re most likely first going to encounter a nurse. Nurses get all the grunt work in health care, and are an indispensable part of the medical system, yet somehow the Trump Department of Education (I thought he was going to get rid of that?) has decided it’s less worthy, and is reducing nursing students’ eligibility for loans. Maybe this is a first step in making nursing training free? Somehow I doubt that.

Even worse, they have designated certain other fields of study as “professional” and worthy of encouragement. Notice anything peculiar in this list?

  • Medicine
  • Pharmacy
  • Dentistry
  • Optometry
  • Law
  • Veterinary medicine
  • Osteopathic medicine
  • Podiatry
  • Chiropractic
  • Theology
  • Clinical psychology

I will admit that after the destruction wrought by RFK’s Health and Human Services, many people might feel a need to call on a priest.