Would you recommend for lower income pre-meds to still apply?

[cait sith doc]

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I graduated from undergraduate school recently with a 3.6 cgpa and a 3.7 in sgpa with a strong upward trend, along with taking my MCAT in which I scored a 522 on, back in April. I am currently taking a gap year off from applying to med school because my volunteer hours are low, due to me having to work, with whatever little time I had left being used to study. I was going to make up for my lack of clinical and non-clinical hours over the span of this year and apply in May of 2026. The problem I face now is that I don't know if I should give up on applying to med school or should I still continue? Thanks to the nonsense that is occurring is DC, involving that bill that passed recently, a limit of course was placed on how much debt you can accumulate from grad plus loans. To put things in perspective, I am currently working minimum wage and am living on government assistance. I thought that the grad plus loans without restriction would always be there as an option. I once read an article about taking out private loans as being an option but to be honest the interest rate is pretty ridiculous and is making me question if it would be worth it. With some people quoting that the loans have interest rate in the teens which is absurd when taking out six figures worth of debt which will accumulate while you're studying.

The only other option I can think of is to try and get lucky, hoping that I can get into one of the few schools that are offering free tuition such as Johns Hopkins, Einstein, NYU, and Cornell. But honestly the chances of getting an acceptance into any of those schools is just as likely as winning the mega lottery. Just about everyone and their mother wants to enter those schools in order to get free tuition. I apologize if I seem to be a little too pessimistic. I just... don't know want to do from here on out and am stuck and confused as to what the next step should be. I was wondering if I am missing something, or if there is another option that I am missing. Or should I just give up on medicine and need to do something else? Thank you for your time.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Follow responses to HR 1 on our forums. I note the videos from AAVMC (to prevets) that are included in the thread.

Post in: 'SDN Article: The “One Big Beautiful Bill”: How New Budget Legislation May Reshape Medical Training and Healthcare Access'

Jul 17, 2025

• Mr.Smile12

 

[cait sith doc]

Follow responses to HR 1 on our forums. I note the videos from AAVMC (to prevets) that are included in the thread.

Post in: 'SDN Article: The “One Big Beautiful Bill”: How New Budget Legislation May Reshape Medical Training and Healthcare Access'

Jul 17, 2025

• Mr.Smile12

Thank you for the link.

 

[deleted1191256]

I graduated from undergraduate school recently with a 3.6 cgpa and a 3.7 in sgpa with a strong upward trend, along with taking my MCAT in which I scored a 522 on, back in April. I am currently taking a gap year off from applying to med school because my volunteer hours are low, due to me having to work, with whatever little time I had left being used to study. I was going to make up for my lack of clinical and non-clinical hours over the span of this year and apply in May of 2026. The problem I face now is that I don't know if I should give up on applying to med school or should I still continue? Thanks to the nonsense that is occurring is DC, involving that bill that passed recently, a limit of course was placed on how much debt you can accumulate from grad plus loans. To put things in perspective, I am currently working minimum wage and am living on government assistance. I thought that the grad plus loans without restriction would always be there as an option. I once read an article about taking out private loans as being an option but to be honest the interest rate is pretty ridiculous and is making me question if it would be worth it. With some people quoting that the loans have interest rate in the teens which is absurd when taking out six figures worth of debt which will accumulate while you're studying.

The only other option I can think of is to try and get lucky, hoping that I can get into one of the few schools that are offering free tuition such as Johns Hopkins, Einstein, NYU, and Cornell. But honestly the chances of getting an acceptance into any of those schools is just as likely as winning the mega lottery. Just about everyone and their mother wants to enter those schools in order to get free tuition. I apologize if I seem to be a little too pessimistic. I just... don't know want to do from here on out and am stuck and confused as to what the next step should be. I was wondering if I am missing something, or if there is another option that I am missing. Or should I just give up on medicine and need to do something else? Thank you for your time.

Hey I’m in a similar boat. I’m honestly considering these two government scholarships while they still exist:

NHSC Scholarship Program Overview | NHSC

Scholarship Program Details - Veterans Affairs Scholarship Program

 

[LelouchLamperouge]

Do what you gotta do to get yours. I took a year off to save up for this application cycle and applied to 40 schools and have submitted almost all 40 secondaries. It’s doable

 

[LelouchLamperouge]

And about the “Big Beautiful Bill”, yes it will be a lot of loans, and yes it will be hard to pay off. But you know what else is hard? coming from nothing and not doing everything you can to change your situation and regretting it later. You have great stats, you can do this

 

[Hollow Knight]

So I come from a similar background as you, parents didn’t help with college and certainly not med school.

IMO you should still apply if it’s what you want to do. If you get into your in-state MD, that’ll probably cost you (private loans depending) around $300,000. You’ll make at least about $200,000 as a primary care physician (barring some catastrophe we can’t predict). That’s a reasonable financial proposition.

The problem becomes if you can only get into a private MD or a DO school. Those will cost you anywhere from $400,000-$600,000. Once you start getting north of $500,000 IMO it stops making sense to borrow the money to become a doctor. People will get on here and tell you to just match a high-paying specialty, but that’s not how it works anymore. You can be a stellar applicant and still SOAP into FM.

So maybe apply, and if you don’t get into a reasonably priced school, just don’t attend.

There’s also the military and the NHSC. But make sure you have those before you borrow all that money; not everyone who applies gets it.

 

[Hollow Knight]

A little unrelated but honestly, the medical training model in the US is pretty ridiculous and not set up with normal working-class people in mind. I don’t blame anyone for picking alternate careers (NP, PA, optometry, dentistry, etc) because they don’t want to deal with not having a real income for so many years and the risk that comes with that. Not everyone has rich parents which is a little hard for many in medicine to understand (the VAST majority of medical trainees come from the top % of income in the country, and when you hang out with medical trainees, that statistic becomes fairly obvious)

 

[Heyigotnoclue]

My issue with this is that private equity has a significant amount of control over medicine these days and I do not see it going away. I only see its expansion. What it means to me is that physician salaries will decrease if these companies have their way. It is all about profit to them, but we still need to pay our bills. Just look at how they are manuevering to have NP's/PA's replace primary care to an extent. Everyone frames it as if PA's/NP's are there to support doctors, but I think it is just a cost saving mechanism. How did we let this happen?

 

[polymerization]

Coming from a very similar background to you, I'd ask do you really have a choice? Sunk cost plays an enormous role here: you probably have a degree in a basic science that is useless at the bachelor's level and a high MCAT that is only recognized by medical schools. You're doing service work/ECs primarily medical schools care about, with limited articulation to other fields like maybe nursing or PA.

If you quit, you end up worse off than when you started because the opportunity cost of having done all of that to fall short of a medical career is unbelievably steep. Few other careers offer the degree of socioeconomic insulation medicine does. Turning to the options, I can't think of any pivots that would make sense and that could protect you from your structural circumstances. There are many ways to make money (sometimes even more than physicians), but those jobs are not systematically attained through education (think CEO, venture capitalist, consulting etc. where it is often more about inherited status/networking).

This is exactly why I swear up and down that this process is unfair. You are asked upfront to put all of your eggs in one basket, and even when you surprise everyone and succeed (often to your own detriment and the chagrin of those already guaranteed success), ranks close and you're told to suck it up and treated as naive for taking the rules of the game for granted. Especially in the setting of the meritocracy and this idea that if you find yourself visibly disadvantaged by the process, you are often treated as undeserving of empathy because your position is to some degree intuited to be "your fault."

You're butting up against the horizon of the social promise this country makes us: that if we can just outwork and outshine and persist despite our disadvantages, we have a real opportunity at a reasonably good life. It's depressing, and I'm going to do you the solid of validating that.

Regardless, what else is there to do? Keep moving. Hope tomorrow brings better news. Keep your head down and keep working. It might take more time and effort than you imagined, and you may find yourself having to be twice as good just to make it half of the way there, but that's the nature of the beast in 2025.

 

[AsclepiusAdvisingLLC]

I graduated from undergraduate school recently with a 3.6 cgpa and a 3.7 in sgpa with a strong upward trend, along with taking my MCAT in which I scored a 522 on, back in April. I am currently taking a gap year off from applying to med school because my volunteer hours are low, due to me having to work, with whatever little time I had left being used to study. I was going to make up for my lack of clinical and non-clinical hours over the span of this year and apply in May of 2026. The problem I face now is that I don't know if I should give up on applying to med school or should I still continue? Thanks to the nonsense that is occurring is DC, involving that bill that passed recently, a limit of course was placed on how much debt you can accumulate from grad plus loans. To put things in perspective, I am currently working minimum wage and am living on government assistance. I thought that the grad plus loans without restriction would always be there as an option. I once read an article about taking out private loans as being an option but to be honest the interest rate is pretty ridiculous and is making me question if it would be worth it. With some people quoting that the loans have interest rate in the teens which is absurd when taking out six figures worth of debt which will accumulate while you're studying.

The only other option I can think of is to try and get lucky, hoping that I can get into one of the few schools that are offering free tuition such as Johns Hopkins, Einstein, NYU, and Cornell. But honestly the chances of getting an acceptance into any of those schools is just as likely as winning the mega lottery. Just about everyone and their mother wants to enter those schools in order to get free tuition. I apologize if I seem to be a little too pessimistic. I just... don't know want to do from here on out and am stuck and confused as to what the next step should be. I was wondering if I am missing something, or if there is another option that I am missing. Or should I just give up on medicine and need to do something else? Thank you for your time.

You should definitely still apply. The fee waver will make the application costs less of a burden. Shoot for public schools that have a much lower cost of attendance, and remember that medical schools give out needs-based aid to students who qualify. All medical students in the nation have to respond to the government legislation, and so does every medical institution. What is important is that if you are passionate about practicing medicine, that you join the workforce and contribute your perspective towards improving the practice of medicine as a clinician.

 

[eigen]

For some context in my answer, I have a PhD in Biochemistry and am a tenured faculty member. I make around $80k/year.

Even with high interest private loans, you will make more than enough as a physician to easily pay off your loans if you are careful in the lifestyle you lead. Tagging into @Hollow Knight's post above, the average physician makes well over twice what I do. That means with what I would consider a reasonably comfortable lifestyle (I own a house and can support a family) I could set aside $120k/year to pay down loans.

While private loans will have higher interest rates (whether they stay as high as they are or adjust as more people need them remains to be seen), you won't have to use them to fund the entirety of your tuition, since a substantial part will still be able to be funded out of grad plus loans. Lets say you took out an additional 150k at 9% interest on a 20 year loan. That would be a total of 324k you would owe over that 20 year period, assuming you don't pay down the principle faster than scheduled. At 12% interest, it jumps to just under 400k. That's a lot, but at even 150k yearly income you should be able to pay it down quite rapidly. Loan rates for private loans depend on a lot of factors, but currently range from about 3-18%, so the numbers I pulled are in the middle.

So in summary, yes, I would still recommend a low-income student apply for medical school. Even with the medical school debt, it is generally the most consistent and stable pathway to a solid upper-middle income as an adult, and likely will keep it's relative position compared to other professions even in the coming years.

 

[engenir]

I also grew up low-income (like really low), and I'm a non-traditional applicant now at the ripe age of ~30. When I was 20 I thought loans were the end of the world and would trap me in the same cycle my parent's were in. Especially medical school loans - $200k was a crazy amount for someone who had never had more than a thousand dollars in their bank account.

Now that I'm older, I realize that loans are a tool. They are a bet on yourself. If you are disciplined with your money you will earn enough to pay off your loans, I can promise you that. I decided I needed financial stability when I was younger, and although I have earned well, I have not been fulfilled. Applying to medical school at this age has been challenging since my responsibilities only increased as I got older. Apply!