GRAND FORKS — Student loan repayment options and federal PLUS loans are seeing the biggest changes with the implementation of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act, said the director of student finance at the University of North Dakota.

Matt Lukach said students will see minor changes, but most of the work to make the alterations will fall upon UND’s system.

“It’s going to create work on our end, though, because all these changes will be manual, so we will have a lot more work on the back end. But hopefully, our students won’t see too much of a change from past years,” he said.

On Wednesday, July 1, changes to federal student aid programs from the OBBBA went into effect. Of the changes, Luckach sees the removal of the SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) loan repayment plan, the removal of the Graduate PLUS Loan Program and the alteration to the Parent PLUS Loan Program and scheduled reductions for federal loans at the undergraduate level as the most significant.

For undergraduate loans, students previously could get their full federal loan even if they were not a full-time student taking 12 credits. Following the changes, loans will be pro-rated down, depending on how many credits a student is taking. Most of UND’s undergraduate students are full-time students, Lukach said. For part-time students, UND will work to make adjustments to loan offers early so they won’t be as affected if they need to find alternative funding. UND already makes schedule reductions for Pell Grant funding.

A big change that may affect graduate students is the removal of the federal Graduate PLUS Loan Program. Some graduate students have used it to fund living expenses and pay for shortfalls while they finish their program. Graduate borrowers who have had a PLUS loan disbursed before July 1, 2026, while enrolled in a program, can continue to borrow for three academic years or the remainder of their program, whichever is less. Newer graduate students won’t be able to get the loans, and Lukach has seen movement in the private loan sector to balance this.

“We have had a lot of traffic, a lot of movement in the private loan sector in the last year to come up with options to help fill that gap of graduate PLUS loans,” he said. “The private educational loan industry is doing a pretty good job of coming up with some really comparable options to that loan.”

The Parent PLUS Loan Program won’t be going away, but it will be capped. Eligible parents can borrow a maximum of $20,000 per aid year per dependent student. In the past there was no cap, but Lukach said there wasn’t a high percentage of parents borrowing more than $20,000.

In Lukach’s opinion, the financial aid changes will be minor to current and incoming students. The bigger changes, he said, are in student loan repayment.

The SAVE plan, PAYE (Pay As You Earn) plan and the ICR (Income-Contingent Repayment) plan all are being phased out. Loan servicers are reaching out to current borrowers notifying them they have to choose different plans, though they can pay through the ICR plan until July 1, 2028. Their other options include a new tiered standard repayment plan and the new Repayment Assistance Plan.

RAP allows borrowers to pay monthly payments of 1-10% of the borrower’s income based on their adjusted gross income, with a minimum monthly payment of $10.

“I honestly don’t know what the effects of these new plans will be yet, because we’ve not heard from anybody, and they just went into effect,” Lukach said. “I’m sure we’ll see some chatter in the next few months on that (RAP) to see if it looks good, bad, the same. It’s hard to tell if it will be a benefit or a detriment to those people who are on the SAVE plan. We’re real early in this.”

New borrowers who borrow loans on or after July 1, 2026, have the options of the new tiered repayment plan or RAP.

Same as any other year, Lukach offers students this advice: Make a financial plan and know what is needed.

UND also has a monthly payment plan to cover gaps between a student’s charges and their financial aid, something Lukach has noticed students use more over the years. Overall, he’s seeing students be more fiscally responsible.

“It’s a good sign,” he said. “It means we have really high-quality students at the University of North Dakota, which I really, really love.”

A new bipartisan bill making its way through Congress aims to protect seniors and other vulnerable people from scams by allowing some financial institutions the ability to pause transaction requests while they investigate potential fraud.

The Financial Exploitation Prevention Act would give open-end investment companies, including mutual funds, the ability to pause redemption requests from people 65 and older or people with disabilities when the institution believes financial fraud or exploitation is at play.

“Financial exploitation is a huge problem in this country,” said Nina Kohn, an elder law expert at the Syracuse University College of Law. Artificial intelligence is also helping fraudsters become more sophisticated and making it harder for people to avoid scams, she added.

Financial abuse cost older victims nearly $2.4 billion in 2024, according to incidents reported to the Federal Trade Commission. The agency noted in its annual report that the estimate of total losses include “only a fraction” of older adults harmed by fraud due to underreporting.

Three people accused of being behind a major romance fraud scheme targeting older adults were indicted by the Department of Justice in May, part of a series of cases that have charged 11 others from the U.S. and Ghana with wire fraud and money laundering.

“The concern is, in part, that individuals may lose their life savings,” Kohn said.

“So financial institutions and entities that are holding individuals’ money can be empowered to help put the brakes on scams by delaying disbursement to a suspected victim,” she added.

READ MORE: As losses from scams surge, Congress asks telecoms to do more to prevent them

The bill passed the House in a 414-2 vote last month, while a similar bill resides in the Senate, though it’s not clear if or when the banking committee under that chamber will consider the legislation.

The overwhelming support for this bill shows “there’s broad agreement that protecting seniors from financial exploitation shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” said Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., one of the bill’s co-sponsors, in an emailed statement to PBS News.

The legislation gives these financial institutions additional tools to “recognize when something isn’t right and help stop financial abuse before the damage is done.”

Here’s what to know about the bill.

What would the bill do?

The bill would allow a financial institution that manages investments, such as mutual funds and some exchange-traded funds, to temporarily halt requests to access funds that it “reasonably believes” might be exploitative.

The bill focuses on requests from two specific groups:

• Someone age 65 or older
• Any adult the financial institution “reasonably believes has a mental or physical impairment that renders the individual unable to protect” their own interests.

It doesn’t require the institutions to carry out the pauses or investigate potential fraud. But there is a proposed framework for delays. The institution can put a hold on the request for up to 15 business days while companies notify a client-provided adult contact that the customer may be the victim of financial exploitation. There are steps an institution can take to extend the hold for another 10 days. A court, state regulator or another administrative authority could also extend the delay.

The bill does not apply to other financial institutions, like banks or credit unions. It does require the Securities and Exchange Commission to submit a report to Congress with recommendations on how to further reduce financial fraud targeting these adults within a year of enacting these measures.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, already allows brokers and money managers to temporarily freeze requests that are from older adults who may be the victims of exploitation.About half the states also have laws on the books that allow banks and sometimes credit unions to do the same.

This federal legislation “fills a gap,” Kohn said, by covering investment funds that are self-managed.

How this bill could help

The Department of Justice identified more than 1 million victims of all forms of elder financial exploitation, fraud, neglect and abuse between July 2024 and June 2025. Offenders allegedly stole or attempted to steal $2.3 billion, according to the department’s latest annual report to Congress.

There are no national reporting standards for how often financial institutions detect exploitation, and when they do, how often they put holds on accounts, said Marti DeLiema, associate professor at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work.

WATCH: How human trafficking victims are forced to run ‘pig butchering’ investment scams

But some state-level data does exist. In Minnesota, of the 286 cases referred for investigation in 2022, temporary holds were implemented in a quarter of them, according to a study DeLiema co-authored.

Half of the banks who responded to a 2024 survey from the American Bankers Association Foundation said they had delayed disbursements or refused or held transactions when they suspected exploitation.

And more than 85% of banks in states without hold laws said they would find them beneficial, the survey found.

“Financial institutions are seeing this stuff is happening. They want to help,” DeLiema said. Sometimes, a conversation from the bank or law enforcement is enough to pull the victim from the scam, she said.

Other times, that’s not enough.

In those cases, temporary holds can be used as a “last resort” to keep the person and their money safe.

Concerns and questions about autonomy

For Kohn, it’s not clear whether the pauses proposed by the bill will prevent the exploitation entirely or just delay it. Putting holds on customers’ accounts also puts financial institutions at risk of degrading trust with their clients.

While 43% of banks in the ABA Foundation survey said they found state hold laws useful in preventing financial exploitation among older people, 45% also said customers reacted negatively to those holds. Nearly 17% said customers closed their accounts after a delay, and 2.4% said the hold has been challenged in court.

Another concern is someone’s self-determination. Allowing financial institutions to stop customers from accessing their own money may verge into limiting people’s ability to make choices about their lives and their own funds, Kohn said.

“The question is: Is that restriction on self-determination justified?” she said.

Giving people the opportunity to make their own decisions, even bad ones, is called “dignity of risk,” a term often used in disability studies.

For example, people are allowed to take their retirement funds and spend it at a casino, DeLiema said, so “why would we stop them from participating in a scam?”

“The answer has to be: The people on the other end are criminally victimizing these individuals. They’re using deception, they’re lying,” she said.

That exploitation leads victims to believe they’re in a relationship with their scammer, or that they’re rescuing a grandchild, or that their money is being invested in cryptocurrencies, she said.

With the rise of deepfakes and other AI-driven technology being used in scams, “all this is going to get a lot worse,” she added.

WATCH: How to recognize and block AI-powered scam attempts

It’s reasonable for policymakers to be concerned about exploitation among older adults in particular, because they tend to lose more money than younger adults and have less time to recover financially, Kohn said.

But she also worries that legislation based on age may perpetuate stereotypes against older people.

If financial holds are good policy, why limit their application, she said.

“I think that speaks to our willingness as a society to curtail the self-determination and financial independence of older adults and people with disabilities to a degree that we are not comfortable curtailing the self-determination and financial independence of other adults,” she said.

The industry’s product menu already stretches from political elections and World Cup matches to weather events. It now includes reality television, with Kalshi’s first markets tied to “Love Island USA” helping to more than double its weekly active female user base during part of June, illustrating how easily an exchange can turn an existing online fandom into a new trading constituency.

Prediction markets aren’t done there. Kalshi is reportedly in advanced discussions with regulators about expanding its perpetual futures business beyond cryptocurrencies into gold, other metals, foreign exchange and energy. Polymarket, meanwhile, has reportedly filed applications that would help it offer margin trading to customers in the United States.

Prediction markets, it would seem, are outgrowing the category that made them famous. They are evolving from event-based content into a new distribution layer for a potential next-generation of retail derivatives.

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Prediction Markets Are Becoming a Product Portfolio, Not a Betting Category

The event contract services business is evolving from predicting discrete events to trading continuous exposure to economically important assets. That transition is occurring just as the industry’s regulatory position is becoming more complicated.

A federal judge this week rejected Kalshi’s attempt to prevent New York from applying state gambling laws to its sports contracts. Last month, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) sued the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and its chairman, Michael Selig, challenging a decision to let Kalshi and crypto exchange Coinbase list perpetual futures.

The result is a market in which product demand may be the easy part. The harder question is whether prediction platforms can develop a compliance system broad enough to support everything from television finales to leveraged commodity trades.

The Love Island contracts, for example, expose the prediction market category’s fundamental surveillance problem. Television episodes are produced before they are broadcast, meaning cast members, production staff, editors and others can possess information unavailable to the public. Similar informational asymmetries arise around economic announcements, court decisions, corporate events and government actions. The more subjects a platform makes tradable, the more types of potential insiders it must identify.

Goldman Sachs prohibited employees from participating in financial and political event contracts that could create actual or perceived conflicts involving the bank, its clients or the financial industry, particularly when workers could possess confidential corporate or macroeconomic information.

The Senate unanimously adopted a rule in April prohibiting senators, staff and officers from participating in prediction markets. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs followed this month with an executive order prohibiting state executive branch employees from using nonpublic government information for prediction market profits.

Read also: Prediction Markets Turn Uncertainty Into a Business Model

A Short History of Prediction Market Products and U.S. Regulation

Despite all the action, prediction markets began as relatively constrained experiments in information aggregation. The CFTC said market operators have sought agency guidance since the early 1990s, and the first prediction market was designated as a federally regulated contract market in 2004. The central idea was that putting money behind a forecast could aggregate dispersed information more effectively than polls, surveys or expert opinion.

The model remained small partly because regulators treated event contracts as exceptional products. Contracts tied to economic indicators, elections or entertainment did not fit comfortably within either traditional futures regulation or state gambling frameworks.

Polymarket demonstrated the potential and limitations of operating outside that system. In 2022, the CFTC ordered the company to pay a $1.4 million penalty and wind down markets that violated federal derivatives laws. Polymarket later returned to the U.S. by acquiring federally licensed exchange and clearing infrastructure, creating a regulated domestic operation that is separate from its crypto-based international platform.

PYMNTS reported in September that when the CFTC issued a no-action letter regarding event contracts in response to a request from two businesses owned by Polymarket, it in essence gave Polymarket a regulatory green light to re-enter the U.S. market.

The industry’s short history, in other words, is not primarily a progression from one betting topic to another. It is a progression from restricted forecasting experiment to full-scale exchange infrastructure. That direction of travel appears to be continuing.