And THE Award Goes To...

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
medicinesux

medicinesux

Full Member
10+ Year Member
5+ Year Member
15+ Year Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2007
Messages
534
Reaction score
13
TUFTS University for leading the way with the highest tuition and fees amongst all medical schools in the entire United States. A whopping $51968 per year! Congratulations are in order for being the first institution to cross the 50K barrier! Surely, others will be taking your lead. Honorable mention goes to Colorado for raping their out of state students for tuition.

http://www.tufts.edu/med/docs/about/offices/finaid/CostsMD.pdf

As you can see this does not include everything else from room, board, health insurance, books, transportation, loan fees, etc. After your four years you will be staring at over 300K in debt!!! And with the loans locked at 7% interest, your debt will be climbing to the tune of 21 thousand smackeroos a year. Don't call me an alarmist. The numbers are right there before you in black ink.

Year 1: $73,336
Year 2: $73,625
Year 3: $84,451
Year 4: $82,966
------------------
Grand Total: $ 314378 (God forbid you have undergrad loans to add!)

The current bleak student loan issue is nothing compared to what lies right down the road. With the economy in the toilet, why is it that tuitions keep spiraling upwards when everything else has come crashing down? Just when you think practicing medicine couldn't possibly get any worse. It always....well.......just does. Should be really interesting to see all this unfold-Got popcorn?

You can watch the acceptance speech below-

[YOUTUBE]wrFhYBAFt34[/YOUTUBE]

Way to go Tufts!!! You are so well deserving of this award.
Members don't see this ad.
 
And yet Tufts will fill their class this year, get their $$, and no one will do anything about it!
 
You know how I love a good xtranormal video. This is very reminiscent of the law school ones over on jdunderground.com.

Tufts should be SHUT DOWN if it cannot give students a better deal for their money. Over 50% to primary care with these kind of numbers? It's not that great a medical school, anyway.

If students go to Tufts with these numbers, then they get what they deserve. Naive premeds, beware!

P.S. Post this in the premed section.


medicinesux said:
TUFTS University for leading the way with the highest tuition and fees amongst all medical schools in the entire United States. A whopping $51968 per year! Congratulations are in order for being the first institution to cross the 50K barrier! Surely, others will be taking your lead. Honorable mention goes to Colorado for raping their out of state students for tuition.

http://www.tufts.edu/med/docs/about/offices/finaid/CostsMD.pdf

As you can see this does not include everything else from room, board, health insurance, books, transportation, loan fees, etc. After your four years you will be staring at over 300K in debt!!! And with the loans locked at 7% interest, your debt will be climbing to the tune of 21 thousand smackeroos a year. Don't call me an alarmist. The numbers are right there before you in black ink.

Year 1: $73,336
Year 2: $73,625
Year 3: $84,451
Year 4: $82,966
------------------
Grand Total: $ 314378 (God forbid you have undergrad loans to add!)

The current bleak student loan issue is nothing compared to what lies right down the road. With the economy in the toilet, why is it that tuitions keep spiraling upwards when everything else has come crashing down? Just when you think practicing medicine couldn't possibly get any worse. It always....well.......just does. Should be really interesting to see all this unfold-Got popcorn?

You can watch the acceptance speech below-

[YOUTUBE]wrFhYBAFt34[/YOUTUBE]

Way to go Tufts!!! You are so well deserving of this award.
Click to expand...
 
Members don't see this ad :)
medicinesux said:
Honorable mention goes to Colorado for raping their out of state students for tuition.
Click to expand...

Michigan State's OOS should be even more ridiculous. $65k/yr for tuition alone for OOS, $92k/yr for total cost of attendance, according to the MSAR.
 
The numbers cited here are insane. If you get out of medical school with that kind of debt, you better hope to god that you get derm or ortho. If you don't, you'll basically enslaved yourself for a few decades.
 
Stanford's cost of tuition is $45k/year of basic sciences, and $60k/year of clinical sciences. If you live off campus, the total cost of attedance for students entering in 2009-2010 is estimated to be ~$330,000 (but merely $317,000 if you live on campus).
 
So what? Doctors make fortunes and can easily pay off this debt. We're not talking auto workers whose lives have been ruined by republican idiocy.
 
psychforme said:
So what? Doctors make fortunes and can easily pay off this debt. We're not talking auto workers whose lives have been ruined by republican idiocy.
Click to expand...

That's the thing, tuition like this can drive medical students to go for high-paying specialties instead of family practice and primary care, which are needed most.
 
psychforme said:
So what? Doctors make fortunes and can easily pay off this debt. We're not talking auto workers whose lives have been ruined by republican idiocy.
Click to expand...

Ha ha. The restaurant up the road went out of business when it's unionized line cooks went up to $60 per hour plus benefits and they had to charge $40 for a $10 meal. Those poor cooks had their lives ruined by republican idiocy. :confused:
 
Yet this whole mess is self inflicted on our community by our community. Is it fair that medschools exploit desperate premeds blinded/handicapped by their legitimate ambitions to become physicians? This Bernie madoff type scheme needs to stop. Medschools by way of their tuition are one of the problems with our healthcare system, and I think any healthcare overhaul needs to approach medschool tuition hikes in much the same way they approach insurance companies' mischievious schemes.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
psychforme said:
So what? Doctors make fortunes and can easily pay off this debt. We're not talking auto workers whose lives have been ruined by republican idiocy.
Click to expand...

Why did I opt not to post this in the premed forum? Here's your answer. Or perhaps you missed this recent thread in the general residency forum started by a premed which was quite a riot-
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=667208

Posting over in premed land would be like a Jehovah witness trying to go door to door in Islamic Iran. You can just imagine how that would go. I take enough grief here as it is.
 
If you guys are at all interested check out these websites:
reducetherate.org where there is a petiton advocating a universal lower interest rate on student loans and/or sign the petition for www.forgivestudentloandebt.com. Obviously no one is adequately representing the student's interests in congress and we have to make our voices heard.
With our reimbursements about to take an even bigger hit, its getting more frightening to practice medicine.
 
thefighter said:
If you guys are at all interested check out these websites:
reducetherate.org where there is a petiton advocating a universal lower interest rate on student loans and/or sign the petition for www.forgivestudentloandebt.com. Obviously no one is adequately representing the student's interests in congress and we have to make our voices heard.
With our reimbursements about to take an even bigger hit, its getting more frightening to practice medicine.
Click to expand...

petition all you want, we're not a big enough voting block. Its not that they "don't get it". They do. We need to stop assigning such benign reasons to thier actions/lack of actions. They aren't moving in the direction of helping us...in fact, they're intentionally moving away from it. Ending deferments and forcing people to accumulate more debt in forebearance wasn't a mistake or oversight. Changing the financial set-up after loans have allready been signed for should clearly be illegal, its basically a violation of contract. Do you really think they want to pay people more to incentivize them into the fields/locations they want us to practice? Why pay when you can use the financial teathers of loans as a leash to pull people where you want them.
 
so if this continues in 10-15 years nobody will want to go into medicine. We will see the 400K loan debt (w/o interest) barrier broken in that time span.

Its sick!! I finished with 139,000 and 3.2 percentage back in 2006 and its painful to see next year loan monthly payments!!!
 
Medicinesux,

I posted a thread in the pre-med forum.

Go check it out.

Oh, and check out the links they have to upenn dental. For this years' class, they are looking at 370k for total cost of attendance!!!!
 
This is insane! I went to a state med school on a full scholarship and still managed to finish with 20K/year borrowed for living expenses (graduated 2004). My wife just finished her med school (also full scholarship) with similar amount of debt. It's around $160K for both of us. Looking at the numbers you guys are flashing here I don't feel so bad anymore!
 
The sad thing is that no matter how high the tuition and debt level is in medicine, people will still blindly enroll. It really is amazing talking to premeds. I lay out all of the facts and they don't flinch at all. I tell them about debt, declining reimbursement, paperwork, loss of autonomy, divorce rate, depression, rates of suicide, and all they can think about is the fact that there are a lot of other smart people jumping into the ocean ahead of them, so it must be ok. There is no convincing premeds. They will go into medicine no matter what the cost. They are fully convinced that it's their destiny and single purpose in life to become a doctor. Some even pretend to understand everything I say, yet they never change their career path. All I have to say is that when they are reaching 400 or even 500k in debt, they will have absolutely no one to blame except themselves. I have been sounding the alarm to deaf ears, so screw them.
 
With these kind of tuition costs I am surprised that the military HPSP scholarships are not a lot more competative than they are.

$400K+ interest? Depending on how fast you repay that loan, (I have read about 30 year plans) you're talking about $600-700K in total debt.

Add in the $25k signing bonus and the higher residency pay and the HPSP scholarship can be worth up to $1 million.
 
That pre-med forum thread is a riot. Still, there's really no good excuse for going to Tufts. Unless you're in California, it's probably going to be easier to get into your in-state school anyway. And it's not as though Tufts is so stellar that it blows any public school out of the water.

I'm extremely fortunate that I go to an extremely cheap and well-regarded medical school. Zero graduation debt FTW.
 
I hate to point it out, but this is capitalism at work. If I make widgets and it costs me $10 per widget, I'll sell them for $20 and make a nice profit. However, if people will buy them for $100, I simply get to keep the extra $$$. That's life.

Med schools can charge whatever people are willing to pay. If people are dumb and willing to pay too much, that's life. Presumably, when med school becomes too expensive, people will stop going / paying that much.
 
aProgDirector said:
I hate to point it out, but this is capitalism at work. If I make widgets and it costs me $10 per widget, I'll sell them for $20 and make a nice profit. However, if people will buy them for $100, I simply get to keep the extra $$$. That's life.

Med schools can charge whatever people are willing to pay. If people are dumb and willing to pay too much, that's life. Presumably, when med school becomes too expensive, people will stop going / paying that much.
Click to expand...

So what about people who aren't dumb and willing to overpay, should they be shut out of medicine? Also, what happens when a significant percentage of grads default on their loans? (Its not like people are paying out of pocket) I cant imagine that being a good thing for the econonomy.
 
filter07 said:
The sad thing is that no matter how high the tuition and debt level is in medicine, people will still blindly enroll. It really is amazing talking to premeds. I lay out all of the facts and they don't flinch at all. I tell them about debt, declining reimbursement, paperwork, loss of autonomy, divorce rate, depression, rates of suicide, and all they can think about is the fact that there are a lot of other smart people jumping into the ocean ahead of them, so it must be ok. There is no convincing premeds. They will go into medicine no matter what the cost. They are fully convinced that it's their destiny and single purpose in life to become a doctor. Some even pretend to understand everything I say, yet they never change their career path. All I have to say is that when they are reaching 400 or even 500k in debt, they will have absolutely no one to blame except themselves. I have been sounding the alarm to deaf ears, so screw them.
Click to expand...

Hey! I was listening...I saw the light....eventually. :D

Unfortunately, dental school is often more expensive then med. But I should get into a few relatively cheap schools and am hoping for some scholarship money from at least one if not a few.
 
Last edited:
aamc.jpg

I think that the whole future physician shortage is being used as a cover by the AAMC and AACOM to pull in more and more tuition dollars by increasing their enrollments. However since the number of residency spots funded by Medicare is capped these enrollment increases will not increase the number of docs anyway. The competition for residency spots will just become more difficult every year as more and more grads compete for a basically static number of residency slots. However just think of how much more cash these med schools are raking in under the cover of "we are trying to prevent a shortage". The fact is that midlevels are being pumped out at record rates and should be looked at in the scheme of things, Every single Minute Clinic I have seen is staffed by midlevels and not docs.
 
Coastie said:
Medicinesux,

I posted a thread in the pre-med forum.

Go check it out.
Click to expand...

Oh Coastie, what have you done??? Now you got all their panties caught up in a bunch. Reading through the responses so far, some of those delusional premeds make the members of Heaven's Gate look perfectly sane-

"315k is cheap":eek:

"I would go in a heartbeat no matter the cost":scared:

"I'm not used to living with a lot of money anyway":rolleyes:

"Life is not all about money":(

"Plus this is America and everyone is in debt anyways. Take a look around":wtf:

"I'd rather wallow in debt living out my dream":wow:

"Tufts is an awesome school and you should all be so lucky as to go there":laugh::lol:

aProgDirector said:
Presumably, when med school becomes too expensive, people will stop going / paying that much.
Click to expand...

Obviously, you haven't been to the premed forum recently. 60% claim they would be willing to eat a poop hot dog to go to their top choice.

dynx said:
petition all you want, we're not a big enough voting block.
Click to expand...

This is not true. There are millions of students coming out of schools each year burdened with ridiculous debt loads. This problem is snowballing into an avalanche fast. Check out the cancel student loan debt facebook group which already has over 230,000 members.
 
Last edited:
APD is spot on. It's easy to blame Tufts, but they're just responding to the market.

It feels wrong to truly resent people just for being that naive... but the mentality in the pre-allo thread is exactly the reason Tufts and other schools can raise tuition to whatever arbitrary level they want.
 
As frustrating as it is to see tuition rates continue to skyrocket :mad:, I'm still moving this to the financial aid forum. You can follow the redirect to continue conversation there.
 
Im curious whats happening to all this money the schools are raising. With the exception of one school, every school is supposedly non-profit. I cant imagine operating expenses being that high.
 
medicinesux said:
This is not true. There are millions of students coming out of schools each year burdened with ridiculous debt loads. This problem is snowballing into an avalanche fast. Check out the cancel student loan debt facebook group which already has over 230,000 members.
Click to expand...

I was speaking of medical school grads alone but i suppose if they don't use the old divide and conquer scheme it could work. I can see them nocking off the cheap debt for low earners, shutting out the professional school loan forgiveness by playing the class card.
 
who keeps moving relevant general residency issues posts to the dead end forum of financial aid?

Salaries (I posted) are relevant. The burden of crappy medical schools with high tuition destroying resident's futures is relevant.

Keep up the good work, mods. :thumbup:
 
Coastie said:
who keeps moving relevant general residency issues posts to the dead end forum of financial aid?

Salaries (I posted) are relevant. The burden of crappy medical schools with high tuition destroying resident's futures is relevant.

Keep up the good work, mods. :thumbup:
Click to expand...

Was wondering why traffic to my blog suddenly dropped in half when I woke up this morning. Now I know why. Agree completely here with Coastie. Never ending increasing debt loads is a topic that affects everyone from medical students up to attendings. This fin aid forum is as dead as a cemetery. Premeds and med students are too occupied with getting into medical school and then being immersed in their studies to think about money until Sallie Mae comes knocking years down the road. This is why this forum gets little traffic. This topic is too important to sweep under the rug like this. Big mistake in my opinion for abruptly moving this thread.:mad:
 
Last edited:
dynx said:
petition all you want, we're not a big enough voting block. Its not that they "don't get it". They do. We need to stop assigning such benign reasons to thier actions/lack of actions. They aren't moving in the direction of helping us...in fact, they're intentionally moving away from it. Ending deferments and forcing people to accumulate more debt in forebearance wasn't a mistake or oversight. Changing the financial set-up after loans have allready been signed for should clearly be illegal, its basically a violation of contract. Do you really think they want to pay people more to incentivize them into the fields/locations they want us to practice? Why pay when you can use the financial teathers of loans as a leash to pull people where you want them.
Click to expand...

And I completely agree with you! Thats why we have to do something about it. Maybe a petition wont do much, but at least it will bring some attention to the issue, and hopefully thats the beginning.
 
Coastie said:
who keeps moving relevant general residency issues posts to the dead end forum of financial aid?
Click to expand...

That would be me.

Coastie said:
Salaries (I posted) are relevant. The burden of crappy medical schools with high tuition destroying resident's futures is relevant.

Keep up the good work, mods. :thumbup:
Click to expand...

medicinesux said:
Was wondering why traffic to my blog suddenly dropped in half when I woke up this morning. Now I know why. Agree completely here with Coastie. Never endiing increasing debt loads is a topic that affects everyone from medical students up to attendings. This fin aid forum is as dead as a cemetery. Premeds and med students are too occupied with getting into medical school and then being immersed in their studies to think about money until Sallie Mae comes knocking years down the road. This is why this forum gets little traffic. This topic is too important to sweep under the rug like this. Big mistake in my opinion for abruptly moving this thread.:mad:
Click to expand...

<sigh>

You can stretch a lot of topics to be "relevant" for the residency forum. By some logic, you could argue that pre-meds coming into the gen res forum and asking "What specialty should I do 10 years down the road?" or "What undergrad major should I pursue if I want to do a neurology residency?" would also be "relevant." You have to draw a line somewhere.

If you like, I can ask someone to move it to the allopathic forum, where it is more relevant than gen res, and is a forum with more traffic.
 
smq123 said:
If you like, I can ask someone to move it to the allopathic forum, where it is more relevant than gen res, and is a forum with more traffic.
Click to expand...

Please do. If it was any of my other threads, I would be like whatever and say just leave it. But this topic I am quite passionate about, as are so many others, and to have it decay away in the financial aid forum would be such a waste.
 
I have to say some of these pre-meds are a riot. Kind of sad actually...
 
2007 #s here:
Average salary of a doc: 155k
Average debt of a student: 139k

When you talk about the highest possible debt a student can have and in the same breath talk about the lowest paying medical specialties, it is going to look ridiculous. But I assure you, many of these kids have done the math and it does work.
Now, will it work in 10 years? Who knows? Salaries have stagnated while loans continue to go up, but at some point the math will tip in the opposite direction and the brains will go elsewhere.
 
I know for sure that the midwest schools (namely Wayne State, Michigan State, and UIllinois) charge $64k in tuition for OOS. I'm one of those suckers. (At least cost of living is super-cheap in all of the above, unlike east coast) About MiliMed, we have quite a few in our class, but interestingly, I think they are all in-state, none of the out-of-staters went for that option. I'm personally seriously considering FAP, I just want to do research down the road so I didn't want to sacrifice a research residency.

And, btw, I'm probably going to do IM. I'm planning on living like a hermit until I'm 40 to pay off my debt.
 
Last edited:
JPR22 said:
So what about people who aren't dumb and willing to overpay, should they be shut out of medicine? Also, what happens when a significant percentage of grads default on their loans? (Its not like people are paying out of pocket) I cant imagine that being a good thing for the econonomy.
Click to expand...

btw, you cannot default on student loans. The only way you don't have to pay them is if you're dead.
 
medicinesux said:
Oh Coastie, what have you done??? Now you got all their panties caught up in a bunch. Reading through the responses so far, some of those delusional premeds make the members of Heaven's Gate look perfectly sane-

"315k is cheap":eek:

"I would go in a heartbeat no matter the cost":scared:

"I'm not used to living with a lot of money anyway":rolleyes:

"Life is not all about money":(

"Plus this is America and everyone is in debt anyways. Take a look around":wtf:

"I'd rather wallow in debt living out my dream":wow:

"Tufts is an awesome school and you should all be so lucky as to go there":laugh::lol:



Obviously, you haven't been to the premed forum recently. 60% claim they would be willing to eat a poop hot dog to go to their top choice.



This is not true. There are millions of students coming out of schools each year burdened with ridiculous debt loads. This problem is snowballing into an avalanche fast. Check out the cancel student loan debt facebook group which already has over 230,000 members.
Click to expand...

It's fun to act all high and mighty when your on the other side, but it wasn't that long ago that most of the med students here were willing to club a baby seal just to get into med school themselves. As ridiculous as the answers may seem from this side of the fence, I am able to remember how the other side looked like so I get it.
 
Shameful. I'm sure cheaper/less desirable schools are going to have people beating doors down to get in, no matter what the standing. If economics plays right, the surge in enrollment possibilities and cash flow will help bring those lower schools up in the following years due to the increased ability to reinvest.

The current bleak student loan issue is nothing compared to what lies right down the road. With the economy in the toilet, why is it that tuitions keep spiraling upwards when everything else has come crashing down? Just when you think practicing medicine couldn't possibly get any worse. It always....well.......just does. Should be really interesting to see all this unfold-Got popcorn?
Click to expand...

It goes up because education in the US is a business, from tuition, loan companies, food service, and even professors who get commissions from materials and books. A business will charge what the market will bear and people are doing it, somehow. They are exploiting people who want to do good things with their lives, but they are acting in an even more disgusting manner than the credit corporations.

Don't worry, there will be a physician shortage in the future, worse than now, and then FMG's from internationally-renowned schools will start filling those spots.
 
lets say i go to Colorado: 82,000K tuition +25K OOS "accountable student support fee"+ 5k other fees/exams/books + 3k mandatory health insurance + 10k room/board + 3K transportation/personal expenses = 128K a year, or 512K for four years

512K FOR FOUR YEARS MED SCHOOL!!!! add 14% APR interest while your doing you 4-8 yrs residency and undergrad debt and you could easily approach ONE MILLION DOLLARS

Congrats colorado out-of-state for breaking the 7-digit mark!

I didn't even think it sallie mae would lend you that much,

Kind of reminds me of america's indentured servants or 1600s indebted european/russian serfs

heck...I wouldn't blame people who just decided to leave the country to escape the debt considering they can't come after you
 
mic43 said:
heck...I wouldn't blame people who just decided to leave the country to escape the debt considering they can't come after you
Click to expand...
I didn't do that, but I did make a decision to go to school in Europe, where it's much, much cheaper. Like next to free. I got high marks and have an excellent MCAT (that is sadly now too old), but finance is a problem. I don't really know how to pay what I would owe back. No family contribution, and I'm nearly self-supported. My way was to couple an international experience, taking advantage of my EU citizenship, and learn a language and go to med school.

Ensuring international recognition is going to a school which says "Harvard Medizinischefakultaet", as Harvard works closely with several German medical schools and structures the schools and evaluates and standardizes the program against theirs. I also have the option of going to Harvard for one year as well. Might take them up on it.
 
Last edited:
And here I was complaining that my tuition went from 28k/yr to 30k/yr...:laugh:
 
mic43 said:
http://www.salliemae.com/get_student_loan/apply_student_loan/interest_rates_fees/#Smart

sallie mae unsubsidized smart options private student loan with a 72 month repayment term

Well, I suppose you could get the 8% rate with a wealthy parent as a cosigner and a longer repayment period

but even then, if you split it up over 30 yrs it would be $3,800 a month for a total payment of over $1,350,000
Click to expand...

That's horrifying. "smart option" indeed.:laugh:

PS: You would max out all other options (staffords, grad plus) before you turned to those.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Next unread thread

Similar threads

northernpsy
Cleveland Clinic doc goes anti-vax
Replies
0
Views
2K
northernpsy
northernpsy
chaii
What happens when a patient with no insurance goes to the ER? ( 2 scenarios )
Replies
10
Views
3K
dpmd
dpmd
rusyrusyrusy
So what happens when medicare goes bankrupt-o?
Replies
24
Views
4K
lee9786
L
P
What goes wrong with managed weight loss programs?
Replies
26
Views
4K
lee9786
L
medicinesux
Bronx woman awarded $60 MILLION for injured LABIA
Replies
11
Views
3K
Shoushu
S
Top