Cost of Attendance and Cheapest DO Schools

[Bacchus]

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Food for thought. 1st year is winding down at PCOM. I took out the full cost of attendance allowed ($63080). As of now, I have over $10,000 sitting around. You don't need to take the full CoA out. I live with roommates so rent/utilities are cheap. I had few moving costs.

 

[jslo85]

I'm probably skimming/generalizing way too much for my own good.

Perhaps it's my writing skills that are poor but I never said 60K for one year, I believe I have always stated that it was at least 60K for all 4 years. I personally believe this is a terribly bad estimate for the following reasons which I will attempt to restate. 11932 is the standing different between the 2009 tuition costs for LECOM against that of PCOM. According to LECOM's exaggerated COA (tried to point this out with how they estimate that a student will spend 800 per year on room/board when if you look anywhere, it's about 250-400), they say that you will spend about 32K more than the tuition on all other things.

Maybe it's just me but I imagine Philadelphia's cost of living to be far higher than that of Erie, whether that is room/board or even food. So you take the flat rate of 40K and then throw on Erie's calculation of 32K (remember this is an overexaggeration in a blue collar small city) on to it and it's already 72K and we've already established attending PCOM will cost even more than Erie so to be "conservative" I'll estimate that it's a 10K addition so you'd be looking already here at 40K difference for all four years. So overall 40K + the base tuition difference with his (11932x4) and that's how I would "realistically" estimate the price difference between COA of both places. Just my own thoughts.

jslo85, I don't know if it's my writing style or if people are just not bothering to read my posts but the whole premise behind making this thread was because the difference in figures I found for the two schools seemed ridiculous. I think I stated something to this effect in EVERY post I've made here. Since I have failed to find more accurate information I wanted to get some ACTUAL rough estimates from more knowledgeable individuals on these forums on exactly how much real money in loans one should expect to save by attending a reasonably priced school like LECOM.

You are one of the few who have attempted to give me some calculations. That being said, would you explain to me how you arrived at savings of 60k per year? Shouldn't it be 60k for all 4 years? What extras account for the quadrupling of the ~15k difference in costs ?

 

[Darkskies]

I would even say that with the room and board, food, and transportation fees, PCOM's COA would at least be 15K more expensive (if 11932 is the difference in tuition only) to attend PCOM than LECOM. Then you multiply 15K by 4 over 4 years and you could very roughly save 60,000 dollars per year hypothetically by attending one school over the other.

Thanks for clarifying jslo85, I guess you had written a typo when doing your calculations earlier. I admit that I'm not the best at expressing myself adequately on these forums and none of this misunderstanding would have occurred in a face to face conversation.

I was bemused when I discovered from my own research(admittedly poor) that the COA of both schools were roughly the same. I did not have prior knowledge that the COA is the maximum amount one can take out in loans and instead assumed that there must be something wrong with the data I had found. This is why I created the thread. Now it appears likely that my data(52k for PCOM and 55k for LECOM) is patently inaccurate(as I had thought) or LECOM allows for a much higher ceiling for its COA than it should.

EDIT: Based on what Bacchus' post, the COA for PCOM is actually 63,080.

 

[Igor4sugry]

As a current DO student I would recommend the following.

Go to the CHEAPEST school (i.e. LECOM).

You have to look at the big picture and realize that at the end of the day all of us will be physicians, and majority will be in Internal med, Family Med, Peds, Psych. And to the people who will be hiring you it will not matter whether you when to LECOM or PCOM, b/c these are almost equal; we are not comparing LECOM to Harvard here.

You will all have the same title after your name, the main difference is the other guy/girl have an extra $40-60k in dept (which is a lot of money at a current 6.8% interest).

Also, don't think that going to PCOM will somehow give you a chance to get into a better specialty. Doing well in medical school is ALL ON YOU. Don't think that having the PCOM name behind you will get you into a better rotation/residency. These programs filter their students based on GPA & Step I score. If you don't have the score, the computer automatically filters you out, and the admission people don't even know you exist.

 

[jslo85]

Agree with elftown for the most part.

But also consider this (going with the analogy that you brought up), if money is an issue for you then by substantially lowering the cost of tuition and in doing so lowering the amount of money you will have to borrow and pay back in the future, you can make the "journey" smoother in the future when you are done with your residency and need to pay back that 60-80K.

Keep in mind you're not only paying for the location, you're paying for the 3rd and 4th year rotations as a DO student and establishing those rotations are key to where you want to do your residency in the future along with your board scores.

 

[deleted707454]

So... 6 years later, what do you guys have to say about DO programs and COA?

 

[Frostbiter]

i'd recommend looking into LECOM for cheapest schools