Florida can revoke your nursing license for student loan default. A bill seeks to end this nightmare.
What if the punishment for falling behind on student loans — were losing your job? Unfortunately, in 14 states, that’s the reality for workers who have a professional license.
In these states, failing to pay back student loans can result in a professional license being suspended, denied or revoked. That includes nursing licenses, and licenses for doctors, teachers, lawyers, therapists and so many other critical professions.
While many states do not enforce these laws, the same cannot be said of Florida. In the past few years, around 900 Florida health care workers have had their licenses jeopardized due student loan default. Around 100 of those workers had their licenses suspended.
Let’s be clear: Revoking a worker’s professional license — for defaulting on student loans — has to end. The potential loss of a nursing license threatens our families, the patients we care for every day, and our colleagues, who rely on us as a critical member of their team.
Fortunately, Florida’s Keep Our Graduates Working Act, H.B. 115, sponsored by Representative Nicholas X. Duran (D), could turn this situation around, by preventing the state from revoking professional licenses for student loan default.
To emphasize why this is so important to pass this bill, I want to tell you the story of Tina, a nurse from Trinity, Florida. Tina went back to school later in life, after being a full-time mom to her two amazing daughters.
She felt that nursing was more than a job; it was a calling. She wanted to help people in the Tampa Bay Area, where she had lived for over 20 years, and she also wanted to help her family. Her husband worked a dangerous job — and she knew it best for her to have a stable career.
So Tina enrolled in nursing school — at a for-profit college, where no waiting list meant she could complete her degree quickly and get right to work.
She studied hard to earn her license, and she also sacrificed two years of her kids’ lives, while she was busy with school. She was extremely proud to graduate and get a job.
What she didn’t expect was that her student loan payments — the result of several loans lumped together — would be over $600 per month. With family expenses, eventually, she got past due. Then, she would catch up — and eventually go past due again. She wound up taking TWO nursing jobs, just to keep up.
Her story is not uncommon, because our education system is broken. In 2019, 45 million borrowers collectively owe more than $1.5 trillion in debt. Many people in Florida — and across the country — are drowning in student debt, while lending institutions profit off of our suffering.
The state of Florida is doubling down on that suffering.
One day, Tina’s lending institution called to say she had run out of deferments — and with no warning, they threatened that her license could be revoked.
But how can nurses ever pay our bills — if we lose our jobs? What will happen to our families? What will happen to our patients — or to our colleagues, who would suddenly be short staffed, jeopardizing their patients?
In order to keep her license, Tina wound up having to come up with almost $2000. If she hadn’t been able to scrape that money together — which many people cannot — she would have lost her whole career.
Of course, everyone understands loans need to be repaid. But not like this. Not by threatening to unravel workers’ entire lives. These laws create a public health crisis.
We need to pass H.B. 115, the Keep Our Graduates Working Act. It is the right thing to do — for employees, their families, and for the people of Florida, who rely on the work of licensed professionals to stay healthy and safe.
