So i've heard medical school is no joke at all. but what seems to scare me the most are the loans i'll have to take soon. i'm currently a hs senior but have decided to attend an undergrad school where i may have to pay $10,000/yr. After that, i'm concerned about paying for medical school. Any suggestions on how to deal with the load of loans? Are you just going to deal with it, and pay it all back after becoming a doctor? And lastly, is there no financial aid available to those who need it? Thanks, appreciate any feedback!
Its good that you are thinking about this ahead of time. If you truly want to do medicine, it comes with a much larger debt load than it did even 10 years ago, so sit down and do the math carefully. Regarding your undergrad school, is the 10,000/year tuition alone, or does that factor in cost of living? If it doesnt, you need to add another 5-10k which is fairly conservative unless you are going to be able to live at home during that time.
Lets look at what will happen to just your undergraduate debt. So lets say your total yearly expense is $20k for undergrad. (If its really only 10k good for you, a lot of students will be closer to 20.) If you do your schooling straight through, ie 4 years undergrad then 4 years med school, then 4 years residency- the loans from your first year of undergrad will basically have 12 years to accumulate interest before you can even start to pay them off. At ~6% your 20k will essentially double during that time. The debt from subsequent years will accrue slightly less interest. Overall, at the end of 12 years your 80k from undergrad will have turned into 141k.
Then, add a whole lot on to that for med school. If you manage to get into a "cheap" state school, your yearly expenses including tuition and living expense will probably be ~25-30k. If you end up getting into only a private school, your expense could easily be 60-70k/year. Basically you would end up looking at anywhere between 250-500k debt.
For federal student loans, some of the interest is deferred, the "subsidized" part, so that eases things a bit. But you are still looking at a pile of debt that will take you many many years to pay off. If I were in HS right now looking ahead I'm not sure I would do it or not. Good luck!
Wow, just looked up tuition for state schools, even pricier than I thought.
http://services.aamc.org/tsfreports/report.cfm?select_control=PUB&year_of_study=2010
