Average student Debt

[202781]

Hey, I was looking through the MSAR and found the average student debt.

Does the debt include living expenses?

At a school that says the cost of attendance is $70k/year (including living) so $280k for 4 years. They say the average debt after graduation is ~$160k. This is similar for pretty much all schools. Do lots of people get scholarships or do lots of people just have an extra $120k lying around...whats the deal?

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[lrkoehle]

I kind of wondered this too.

 

[funkydrmonkey]

Hey, I was looking through the MSAR and found the average student debt.

Does the debt include living expenses?

At a school that says the cost of attendance is $70k/year (including living) so $280k for 4 years. They say the average debt after graduation is ~$160k. This is similar for pretty much all schools. Do lots of people get scholarships or do lots of people just have an extra $120k lying around...whats the deal?

There are the people who get full scholarship, people have help from family... and other people live cheaply, as in live off ramen and other stuff... but many schools do give some money in the form of grants and scholarships to almost everyone, so in this care it reduces the indebtedness...

 

[Siverhideo1985]

Interesting report...a bit outdated (from 2003) but shows the general trend and a distribution of debt...I don't think the relative bell-shaped curve (neglecting the people that have no debt at all) has changed for the graph that shows percent of students vs. amount of debt, it has probably just shifted to the right.

https://services.aamc.org/Publicati...version21.pdf&prd_id=102&prv_id=113&pdf_id=21

 

[quiltlady]

some people are on full military scholarships, too.

 

[JeetKuneDo]

Hey, I was looking through the MSAR and found the average student debt.

Does the debt include living expenses?

At a school that says the cost of attendance is $70k/year (including living) so $280k for 4 years. They say the average debt after graduation is ~$160k. This is similar for pretty much all schools. Do lots of people get scholarships or do lots of people just have an extra $120k lying around...whats the deal?

Lol, I like this one, wish it would be me some day. Reminds me of the time my idea to get enough money to buy a macbook would be to save ten dollars a week, so maybe I'd live off of top ramen for a while. I'm still churning away.

 

[xanthomondo]

2x what the people said above. The people who are on any scholarships (military, etc.) will skew the curve.

Also, one of our professors said a trend is that the schools with higher average debt correlate with those who tend to have classes full of first-generation physicians (no parent doctors to pay down the tuition).

Unless you have some sort of education fund or are joining the military, I wouldn't expect to be the "average" in debt.

 

[Blesbok]

And people like me studied medicine in countries where med school is still rather affordable even if you're from a lower income background. If you go to a public university in Mexico, intuition is automatically 100% free and the educational level is very good. I live rather humbily right now, but I won't graduate with debt.

Except that he is talking about a specific school...

 

[DrYoda]

At least some schools (WashU) only count people who have debt, so anyone who's parents or the military pick up the full tab will not count towards the average debt.

 

[235009]

here's the thing about averages: they don't tell you what you want to know. from what i see most schools just take the total amount of debt and divide it by the total number of students in the class...so in the extreme example say that half the students took out the whole cost of attendance in loans and the other half paid for everything themselves or through their parents. So that means 50% have a debt of lets say $250k and the other half a debt of 0, which gives you the not very helpful average debt of $125k. Of course this is an extreme example but you can see how including a bunch of people from both extremes of the debt spectrum can really skew your results.

As for the schools who supposedly only count people who have debt....you'd be an idiot not to take the $8500 in subsidized loans every year from the government...any body who knows anything about econ will tell you that if someone offers you money interest free for four years you should absolutely take it because $8500 four years from now is worth less than $8500 right now. So WashU and other schools that say they are only counting people who have debt might not be averaging people who have the maximum debt with those who have 0 debt but instead averaging people with max debt with others with $34,000 in debt which again gives you a skewed picture.

those average numbers are nice to glance at but you'd really have to make a determination based on your specific case and the amount of aid the school is offering YOU. the average indebtedness means nothing to you if you are one of those people who will have to take the max amount in loans.

to those mentioning military and primary care scholarships: those are moot points because very few people take them, especially at "top" schools, so they aren't what is skewing the average. i think people on SDN grossly underestimate the number of people who get significant help from their families which tends to reduce debt. Also need-based financial aid at wealthier universities would also make a big dent in that.