The Chiropractic Student Loan Gravy Train Just Reached its Last Stop

The Big "Beautiful Bill" Just Dealt a Crippling Blow to Chiropractic Education and the Cartel that Feeds off of it.

July 4’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” torches unlimited Grad PLUS loans—and, with them, the ACC’s $300 K tuition business model

What Just Happened to Chiropractic on Capitol Hill?

Late in the afternoon of July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Tucked inside the 900-page measure is the most sweeping rewrite of federal student-loan policy in two decades. The headline for graduate and professional students is simple but seismic: Grad PLUS—the program that once allowed borrowers to take out government loans with no aggregate limit—will disappear for anyone taking new loans after July 1, 2026. In its place, Congress created a single tier of unsubsidized Direct Loans that accrues interest immediately and carries a firm lifetime ceiling. From now on, every borrower—whether pursuing a bachelor’s, a master’s, or a professional doctorate—may accept no more than $200,000 in total federal loans over a lifetime, and the annual allotment for professional programs is capped at $50,000. The law also consolidates income-driven repayment into one 10-percent-of-discretionary-income plan with forgiveness only after thirty years, and it forces colleges with poor repayment records to reimburse the Treasury for a slice of unpaid principal.

“Graduate students would be limited to $50,000 a year, with a $200,000 lifetime maximum.”

The ACC’s Lobbying Runs Into a Brick Wall

Only six weeks ago the Association of Chiropractic Colleges (ACC) implored senators to protect unlimited borrowing, insisting that a chiropractic degree costs between $200,000 and $300,000 and that anything less would be “existential” for their programs. Washington has now imposed an even tighter ceiling and eliminated the safety valve altogether. The Grad PLUS program will close, and the new lifetime limit—ironically the very sum the ACC cited as a bare minimum—now includes a student’s undergraduate debt as well. The lobbying playbook that portrayed higher loan caps as a matter of institutional survival has become a monument to its own defeat.

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“Programs would become financially unsustainable.” — ACC talking-points memo, May 2025

ACC: Time to Choose Reform over Rhetoric

The clock is now ticking loudest for the very colleges that insisted a $300 k price tag was “normal.” With unlimited federal credit gone, the Association of Chiropractic Colleges can no longer hide behind boiler-plate letters or point to Congress as the lone obstacle. If the ACC truly wants its member schools to survive, it must step forward and demand the breakup of the cartel it has quietly protected for decades. That means calling for open accreditation beyond the CCE, supporting state efforts to replace NBCE Part IV with affordable competency exams, and trimming bloated “primary-care” coursework that pads tuition without boosting graduate earnings. In short, the path to innovation now runs straight through antitrust reform—and the ACC’s silence is no longer merely embarrassing; it is an existential threat to its own institutions.

“Silence from the ACC is no longer fiscally neutral—it's existential.”

Why the Cartel’s Business Model Just Blew Up

Unlimited federal credit has long masked the true cost of an ACC-style education. Colleges such as Life, Parker and Northwestern steered students through in-house bachelor’s programs, loaded them with tens of thousands in pre-professional debt, and then funneled them straight into a doctoral curriculum that assumed Grad PLUS would cover anything above Stafford limits. That pipeline is now broken. Every dollar borrowed as an undergraduate counts against the single $200,000 cap, reducing the room available for the D.C. degree itself. Add-on master’s programs—which schools marketed as a way to postpone repayment while tapping a fresh tranche of PLUS money—lose much of their appeal because there will be no new federal cash to draw from, and interest will start piling up the moment the loan is disbursed.

The new institutional “risk-sharing” surcharge makes the calculus harsher still: beginning in 2028, any program whose graduates struggle to repay will have to refund two to five percent of the unpaid balance to the government. Expensive curricula that do not translate into salaries large enough to service the debt will become a direct liability for the college, not merely for the borrower.

“Unlimited loans masked cartel pricing; hard caps expose it.”

Opening for Real Reform

Because the OBBBA curbs the very revenue stream that allowed monopoly pricing to flourish, it creates political oxygen for the larger antitrust fight already under way. States can now press harder to end “CCE-only” accreditation clauses, arguing that genuine price competition requires multiple accrediting pathways. Regulators considering whether to drop the NBCE’s costly and unnecessary Part IV practical exam will have new fiscal evidence: a candidate who must already finance every exam fee with private loans beyond the federal cap is a candidate penalized by cartel rules. Meanwhile, colleges will be forced to scrutinize every credit hour that does not demonstrably raise graduate earnings, because tuition padding now threatens both enrollment and future risk-sharing penalties.

Where the Conversation Goes Next

This latest hit lands just months after the cartel’s first concussion: Congress voted to sunset the U.S. Department of Education and, in the process, the agency issued its final Dear Colleague Letter reminding states that no federal statute requires a single “sole-gatekeeper” accreditor for any profession. That letter effectively told boards and legislators they are free to recognize alternative accreditation pathways today—precisely the loophole the CCE monopoly fears most. Taken together, the dismantling of the Department’s oversight machinery and OBBBA’s hard loan caps deliver a one-two punch that leaves the cartel staggered and the ACC with no shelter from competitive reform.

For students and alumni, the message is clear: demand tuition rollbacks or detailed cost-cutting plans that bring sticker prices beneath the federal ceiling. State associations that faithfully forwarded ACC talking points must decide whether they represent practicing chiropractors or the institutions that bill them. Boards of chiropractic examiners can revisit whether mandatory NBCE exams and CCE monopolies still serve the public when they inflate costs no borrower can cover with federal aid. Reform advocates, finally, have an opportunity to finish the job—dismantling the intertwined monopolies that elevated tuition to unprecedented heights in the first place.

Independence Day 2025 did more than light up the night sky; it detonated the debt machine that powered chiropractic education’s cartel economy. The question now is whether the profession seizes the moment to rebuild on sustainable ground or scrambles to resurrect a gravy train that has reached its last stop.