Can you elaborate?
There is no harm telling us which school is charging you over $400k. We can narrow it down to 40 schools out of 64.
The word is getting out about CRNA as a great ROI career. Eventually, maybe in a decade or so, the training programs/schools will catch on and charge $300k+ tuitions. The same fate dentistry had to go through the past 10-20 years.
You have to understand national, state and local demographics to understand the saturation problems in dentistry.
I think this is the type of things we should be telling predents.
Apples and oranges. The advise here is for pre-dents who will be dentists 5-7 years from now. Unlike the older 40+ yrs old dentists with almost no debt, the dental school debt 5-7 years from now is going to create a big dent on their plans to become successful dentists. The pre-dents can always come back and read these “Beware” posts after they finish DS.
These 40+ yo dentists also had to pay back their student loans. The reason they are debt free now is they have worked hard since they were 26-27 years old (if they went to dental school the traditional route). If one can't pay back $3-400k loan after 15+ years working as a dentist, then there must be something wrong with his work ethics, his clinical skills, or his spending habit.Apples and oranges. The advise here is for pre-dents who will be dentists 5-7 years from now. Unlike the older 40+ yrs old dentists with almost no debt, the dental school debt 5-7 years from now is going to create a big dent on their plans to become successful dentists. The pre-dents can always come back and read these “Beware” posts after they finish DS.
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It will still be good if the debt level is at $300-350k. Many of my GP friends, who graduated from USC, LLU and other expensive private schools in the late 90s, early 2000s, owed $200-250k in student loans and they had no problem paying them back with their starting salaries of $70-80k/year. They started working when they were 26-27yo. And by the time they reached 40 yo, they were student debt free.
Nope. Today’s 40+ years old dentists graduated 15+ years ago, when average student loan was closer to $150k. New grads today graduate with close to $350k in student loans on average. Pre-dents today are easily looking at $450k on average.
I graduated from UCLA with $92k debt + $50k (for ortho) + $25k in credit card debt (had to live on credit card because they didn't me give enough loan to live during my ortho residency). Many of my friends, who graduated from USC, LLU, BU at around the same time with me, had $200-250k student loan debt. Those 557 burs cost $1.50-$2.00 each. The Ivorine teeth cost $2-3 each. Highspeed speed handpieces cost $400 each. These supplies added up quickly. We had to buy them at the absurdly inflated prices at the school's store. There were no cheap stuff that we could buy on Ebay when we went to school.
Yes, you started at a lower income as a new grad, but you also fully enjoyed the income jump that dentists experienced for the past decade or 2 - which will not happen again for future dentists, IMO. Why? Because the number of schools and new grads are much higher today than they were when you graduated. It’s a more saturated world for dentists, which subdues the likelihood of a higher income. Also, you and I benefited from the 2008 recession - we bought properties and made other investments - a period that is unlikely to repeat itself for new grads and future grads to take advantage of. Yes, you see lower income demographics - but their purchase power relatively jumped couple of decades ago more than it is today and for the coming decades.
I agree that it's more saturated in many parts of the country now but it's still not as bad as what we had to face in CA. CA market was already saturated 15-20 years ago. Most of us here had to accept medicaid and other low pay plans in order to attract more patients...in order to survive. You, young guys, don't have to do that yet in Ohio and in other parts of the country....and your offices are still doing very well.
Charles and I agree to disagree on the FINANCIAL future of dentistry, but I think he is a little bit oblivious to the broader future market conditions. Maybe because he is really hoping some of his kids/relatives applying to dental or medical schools soon can still catch the full rewards of dentistry with hard work. Time will tell.
Not sure how Ohio is, but here in Phx. These suburbs you speak of are the 1st areas most dentists and Corps open in.
Corps have teams that search for locations in communities/counties that will experience growth for the next decade or more. It’s not a big secret - just follow home developers and retail stores, and a small new opportunities and markets open up all the time. That’s why I suggest the upcoming census report (btw, census day is April 1st) is a good tool to use to follow the growth trends, that’s a big source for the businesses that build communities. Corps are doing this too, maybe that’s why solo practice ownership is at a historic lows - because solo dentists are not doing their research in the right places. It can be an illusive to process to open a new practice if you don’t understand where to set up your camp.
Coldfront wasn't like that. He used to have a very optimistic view about dentistry. If you go back to read his many of his old posts when he was still a dental student, you see what I am talking about. He is doing very well as a dentist right now. I am surprised to see the change in his view about this wonderful profession.
Those posts were 10-15 yrs ago, when the most expensive dental school was about $400k and the starting salary was about $110-130k. Today’s most expensive school is almost double, at about $700k with the interest - while the starting salary barely changed, an average of $130-140k. I was optimistic as a dental student, assumed student debt would not go up at a faster pace than income. I also assumed corporations would not be everywhere, dental insurances would not become a major obstacle to dentists by lowering their reimbursement fees every year. Income to debt ratio of dentists significantly increased over the past decade.
I remember back then, a lot of practicing dentists already complained about the high debt, the openings of new dental schools, and about dentistry being a dead end career. You were one of the people, who repeatedly defended the profession with a lot of stats....ie stats that showed higher number of older dentists who retire than the number of dentists who graduate.
Charles. You are 100% right. I was fortunate being a dentist at the right time and at the right place. I always speak about the future of dentistry from an “average” dentist perspective. You work very hard, @2TH MVR did too, @TanMan and few others here are definitely up there with us, and none of us are the “average” dentist in my book. We all have common personal and business qualities, work ethics and constantly mindful of the state of the profession.
Most likely going to be a different world we'll be living in once he retires and run for ADA presidency.
I am just an average orthodontist. I can’t charge high treatment fees like my colleagues and expect to get the same number of patients to start treatments at my offices. To earn the same income as my colleagues, I have to work more days per month than them and I have to work on Saturdays and Sundays. English is not my first language. I didn’t go door to door as much as I should have when I started my practice. None of my referring GPs is White….most of them are Asians, who treat low income patients like me. I think young kids today can do much better than me. They speak perfect English. They are smarter and have much higher undergrad GPAs than me. If they work hard, they will be 100x more successful than me.
The average orthodontist doesn’t have 2-3 offices like yourself. They are not married to another dentist, owns passive income properties, very frugal with their money and have 0 debt from all those enterprises at age 48. Come on Charles! You are not an outlier, but you are definitely not an “average” orthodontist.
4 very small offices (2 of them are not mine....I share them with the GP owners). It's not uncommon for orthodontists to open multiple office locations to expand the patient base. It's almost impossible to fill the ortho appointbook book with 50-80 patients in a day, 5 days/week at one office location. If I charge the average fee of $5000 a case, I don't think I would have as many patients as I do now.
I have a feeling the military scholarship programs will not continue to play along with the schools raising their tuitions every year forever. I think the military scholarship accountants will eventually cap the money they pay for their new grad recruits, or they will become selective to recruit student applicants that will need the least amount of debt covered.
www.thestreet.com
Not for primary care physicians. Many are in a lot of debt too.Physician salaries have been steadily increasing during the past five years.
The Average Doctor Salary by State and Specialty
Doctors are seeing an upward trend in annual income, especially when they specialize. But there are other factors at work when it comes to physicians' incomes.
What about dentist salaries?
A $500k+ debt in medicine or dentistry still has the same psychological effects, whether you are 26 or 31, you still start from the same negative number and carry that weight of debt to a finish line.
If both have kids at 31, the one who started working at 26 will have less debt because of the 5-year head start. By the time their kids are 6-7 years old, the one who started working early should be done with the student loans (assuming that both are on a 10-yr repayment plan) and can afford to work less and spend more time with his/her kids. Having more time with kids and less worry about work should lead to a happier lifestyle.
Different people have different opinions about getting married and having kids. If a person doesn’t want neither of these, then it doesn’t really matter how much debt he/she owes because when he dies, his debt will be erased. If I were that person, I would just work as little as possible…. lease a $100+k car every 2-3 years, travel everywhere, and sign up for the IBR plan.The idea of a family is changing. Majority of people under 30 are not married in this country and kids are the least of their concerns in the future - due to cost and delayed marriage. Just look at the fertility rates, record low. Most of the young generation are not repeating what their parents did. 40% of them grew up in single parent home. 25% never talked to their father. What you described about your sister is the typical nuclear family success - and more than likely her son will not do the same for his kids, because he is in a different generation than his mother. Nuclear family has changed drastically over the years and will probably not exist for the most part in the coming decade or 2.
David Brooks Says The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake. Is He Right?
David Brooks wants Americans to ditch the idea of the nuclear family. We'll hear why.www.wbur.org
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I am not aware of the trend because I am surrounded with people who have kids like me. We are regular churchgoers and most people at our church are married and have kids. Our kids go to private schools and we make a lot of friends with other parents…..and all of them are excellent parents....we've learned a lot from them.
The only western country with a birth rate above replacement is Israel as far as I'm aware. Outside of the religious community in America, it's almost impossible to find anyone who wants more than 2 kids, if any.
The trend is more visible in urban areas, not so much in suburbs and rural communities. If you took a snapshot of communities in 1980 versus 2020; families are much smaller (more pets are in family pictures today), people are more financially liberated (more jobs), people are more informative (due to the internet and technology), their lives are less dictated by their church and communes, people listen more to people they work with or with similar goals and interests, etc. This is the future, whether one agrees with it or not. There will always be people who choose to go to church every Sunday and want to have big families, but their kids will eventually break that cycle. Even for new immigrants, they are naive to think their kids will preserve their language and culture for many generations to come - little do they know that all international communities will eventually become fully assimilated - as they say, America is the graveyard of all foreign cultures. How many Italian-Americans speak the Italian language? How many Jewish-Americans speak Hebrew? It’s inevitable.
