If your program’s cost requires you to take on private loans to cover the gap between what you can borrow federally and what tuition and living expenses actually cost, that’s telling you something about the program’s cost structure. It’s not a financing puzzle for you to quietly solve on your own.
This matters more than it used to. As of July 1, 2026, Grad PLUS loans, which previously let graduate students borrow up to their full cost of attendance, were eliminated for new borrowers. Graduate students, acupuncture programs included, are now capped at $20,500 a year and $100,000 lifetime in federal loans. If your program costs more than that annually, and most do, the difference increasingly has to come from a private lender.
It’s worth understanding exactly what you’d be giving up if you took out private loans. Federal loans come with fixed interest rates set by law, income-driven repayment plans (RAP, as covered in Part 4) that cap your monthly payment based on what you actually earn, deferment and forbearance options if you hit a rough patch, and eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness if you end up at a qualifying nonprofit or community health employer. Private loans offer none of that. Rates are set by the lender based on your credit, often variable, and can run well above current federal graduate rates of 8.07% for anyone without an established credit history or a cosigner, which describes a lot of career-changing acupuncture students. There’s no income-driven repayment and no forgiveness pathway, period. If your income is $38,000–$48,000 at the fourth year of practice, a private loan gives you almost no flexibility to adjust your payment to match that.
So if your program’s true cost, once you subtract the new federal cap, requires you to take on significant private debt just to attend, that’s not a program that I would be attending. You have other, much better options. And ethical schools will be doing the work to create structures that do not require you to over-borrow and especially not to borrow private loans. Please do not agree to take these out silently and hope it works out later.
If you’ve already taken out private loans, look up your servicer, your current interest rate, and your repayment terms today, not at graduation. Know exactly what you owe and to whom. This will matter enormously for how you plan your first year out, and it’s much easier to face clearly now than to discover in the middle of exit counseling. You are going to need to get to work fast after graduation, at a job that can pay you enough to pay those loans off. That means you might have to take a job doing something other than acupuncture for a while.
This is the fifth in a short series on concrete things you can do before you graduate, not complicated things, just things nobody tells you are options. If you are a prospective student, please see my Questions to Ask Every Admissions Office when you are deciding what program to choose (or whether you should wait).
Questions to Ask Admissions Office
Next up: the tincture of time, and why waiting isn’t the same as doing nothing.
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