When the RISE rule was finalized in May, the reaction centered on graduate students: a 20,500 dollar annual borrowing cap, a 100,000 dollar lifetime ceiling, and the elimination of Grad PLUS loans that had allowed students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. The Association of American Universities warned it would shut doors to law and medical school. A month later, the picture had darkened further, with 7.5 million SAVE plan borrowers receiving transition notices and NIH grant success rates collapsing in parallel. Both stories captured something real. But they focused on the part of the law aimed at graduate students. The provisions aimed at everyone else have received far less scrutiny. Start with Parent PLUS loans. Until July 1, a parent can borrow the entire gap between financial aid and cost of attendance, with no fixed ceiling, for each child they send to college. That program will cap at 20,000 dollars per year and 65,000 dollars over a student's undergraduate career. At a school charging 85,000 dollars a year, after a typical aid package, a family that currently covers the remaining 30,000 through PLUS will hit the annual cap at 20,000 and the lifetime cap partway through junior year. Parent PLUS loans taken out after July 1 will also be ineligible for income driven repayment and can only be repaid on the standard plan. The families affected are not wealthy; wealthy families do not borrow through PLUS. They are the middle income households who earn too much for need based grants and too little to write tuition checks, the ones the federal lending system was ostensibly built to serve. Then there are the provisions arriving in 2027. Unemployment and economic hardship deferments, which allow borrowers to pause payments during financial distress, will be eliminated for anyone whose loans are first disbursed after July 1, 2027. Forbearance, the last resort option for borrowers who cannot pay, will be capped at nine months within any 24 month period. These are not changes to how much students can borrow. They are changes to what happens when a graduate loses a job or gets sick. For a generation of borrowers who watched the pandemic freeze payments for three years, the message is blunt: that will not happen again. Set against these restrictions is a quieter expansion. Beginning this academic year, Pell Grants will cover credential programs lasting fewer than fifteen weeks, worth up to 7,395 dollars. An HVAC certification, a coding bootcamp, a commercial trucking license: these will be federally subsidized in a way that a second year of a master's in social work is not. The FAFSA formula itself is changing, excluding the net worth of family farms and small businesses from aid calculations, a provision that benefits rural families but was negotiated in a bill that simultaneously restricts the most common vehicle those families use to finance a four year degree. Congress is not cutting support for education. It is redirecting it, away from long degrees at expensive institutions and toward short credentials at cheaper ones. Whether that reflects what the labor market actually needs or what is simply easier to fund is a question the law does not answer. The economist William Bennett argued in 1987 that federal aid inflates tuition: the more students can borrow, the more schools charge. The debate over whether he was right has never been settled, but the One Big Beautiful Bill is the largest policy experiment testing the theory. If Bennett is correct, the caps should force institutions to compete on price. If he is wrong, they will simply sort students by family wealth, with the schools that have pricing power continuing to charge what they charge and filling seats with those who can pay out of pocket or borrow privately. The schools most likely to lower tuition are the ones already struggling to fill seats, the ones whose bond ratings are slipping, the ones the demographic cliff is coming for regardless. The next two admissions cycles will make clear which version of the story is true. The students enrolling this fall do not have the luxury of waiting to find out.