Degrees Declassified: An Attack on Women?
Project 2025: The Ideology Behind the Agenda
The people behind the Project 2025 agenda, and its supporters (hereafter referred to as MAGA), have outlined and approved specific tasks set out in the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise published by The Heritage Foundation. The ultra-conservative, right-wing group has been making policy recommendations since the Reagan Administration in 1981. While the specific 180-day playbook is a blueprint for remaking the U.S. Government, it has yet to be made public. However, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project is available online. Both documents weigh in at 900+ pages.
In the same breath, the document that speaks of increasing educational freedom and decreasing government overreach has instead resulted in extreme overreach through concerted efforts to curtail educational freedoms:
Banning books;
Dictating curriculum to replace historical truths with conspiracy theories, exclusions and outright lies, while rejecting the correction and addendum of textbook history to included neglected histories of indeginous people and people of color
Withholding congressionally approved funds.
My favorite yet (pg. 322) is a section titled Safeguarding civil rights. For those that like to peruse headings to formulate their opinions, you might want to read this short passage, which rejects gender ideology and critical race theory. In other words, it removes civil rights safeguards rather than protecting them as the heading suggests. It’s as if the writers assumed that most would not tackle reading this behemoth of patriarchal excretions.
Latest Federal Attack on Women
First the Federal government established control over women’s bodies when it removed access to abortion and women’s healthcare. Now professional women are under fire in a clause buried in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). It’s easy to hide snippets of absurdity inside 900+ pages. Nine hundred pages seems to be a theme in these Heritage Foundation/MAGA-backed documents. One wonders what else will be unearthed over the next few weeks, months, years.
Loan Cap Impact on Female-Dominated Professions
After gutting the Department of Education and insisting that responsibility for overseeing education should be the purview of the State, The MAGA Congress once again sticks its finger into the pot, by removing several degrees’ professional classification. These include:
• Nursing
• Physician assistants
• Physical therapists
• Audiologists
• Architects
• Accountants
• Educators
• Social workers
The data below clearly illustrates what’s behind deciding that these are no longer considered professionals.
Percentage of Women in U.S. Workforce
| Degree | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| Nursing | 15% | 85% |
| Physician assistants | 28% | 72% |
| Physical therapists | 30% | 70% |
| Audiologists | 14% | 86% |
| Architects | 63% | 27% |
| Accountants | 40% | 60% |
| Educators | 17% | 83% |
| Social Workers | 16% | 84% |
There is no doubt that this change is a new attack on women.
Why Downgrading Professional Degrees Matters
Downgrading important, female-dominated professions is a new battlefront that reeks of an attempt to return women to the home. Removing professional status from these degrees makes them less appealing, and even unachievable as the change affects access to financing. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the once $200,000 aggregate loan cap for professional degrees is now subject to the lower $100,000 graduate loan cap.
Nurses are already in short supply and the OBBBA will likely exacerbate the problem according to Nurse.org. According to the Association of American Universities, the OBBBA’s ruling limits access to advanced education needed for professional degrees and will create or worsen labor shortages in some professions.
When Checks and Balances no Longer Apply
Aptly portrayed in Animal Farm by George Orwell, the pig takes over the government, and through propaganda, revisionist history and loss of the ideals that were once held as sacrosanct; the people don’t even realize he is not a person for a very long time. They initially believe they are better off under the pig’s rule and they become conditioned to their new reality they can no longer remember the past.
This short passage from Mandate for Leadership, (top of pg. 323) explicitly "rejects gender ideology and critical race theory," effectively doing away with civil rights safeguards and not protecting them as the heading suggests. This is part of the overarching view that "Congress should set policy—not Presidents through pen-and-phone executive orders, and not agencies through regulations and guidance" But that is not the State of the Union, is it?
Respectfully submitted,
Kylie Sabra
Chart References (Other links are indicated in the article.)
DATAUSA, Audiologists
EntreArchitect, The Architecture of Motherhood, Gloria Kloter
Aibm American Institute for Boys and Men, Major changes: Gender shift sin undergraduate studies over time, Ravan Hawrami, Alanna Wiliams, April 3, 2025
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