During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans shouted from balconies, clapped from windows and banged pots in nightly appreciation for nurses, public‑health staff and other essential workers. Five years later, those same workers are facing something unthinkable: a federal move to strip their degrees of “professional” status—to dramatically reduce the financial support for these degrees and diminish the legitimacy of those professions.

The Department of Education claims its recent proposal to redefine what counts as a “professional degree” is about costs. But in truth, it poses one of the sharpest threats in decades to our nation’s health‑workforce pipeline and Americans’ access to care. It will impact whether a child in a rural county, a senior in care, or a parent or child

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