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I never said every student had that much in loans, I said it is 100% possible. The average student loan debt for undergrad, not a for-profit school is $24k.
You said if you went to Harvard you'd end up with more than 40k which is way off.
I never said every student had that much in loans, I said it is 100% possible. The average student loan debt for undergrad, not a for-profit school is $24k.
Again, I never said the average debt was 80k! I said it was possible to have that much debt! Please actually read what I said before posting.
You used the terms most and a lot in your statements.
Personal examples are nice but using them as fact when taking about "most" or "many" is not a good idea.
You claimed Med students end up with 300k which is way off.
The average debt balance of med students upon graduation is $156k. Again, that is average. After interest accrues during residency (when you are not making enough to pay back), you can absolutely have over a $300k balance in debt from medical school.
That being said, you are making a high salary, so typically it isn't a problem to pay back. Having $300k in debt and having a $250k salary is an OK tradeoff.
The average debt balance of med students upon graduation is $156k. Again, that is average. After interest accrues during residency (when you are not making enough to pay back), you can absolutely have over a $300k balance in debt from medical school.
That being said, you are making a high salary, so typically it isn't a problem to pay back. Having $300k in debt and having a $250k salary is an OK tradeoff.
That is quite the spin. Going from 150k to 300k on interest. There are too many variables after Med school to speculate on what happens to the debt. The article you linked is an example of a really dumb choice by one person. I do agree that 300k to pay off if you are making 250k is not a big deal.
There are Exceptions to every rule but they really are not relevant in a larger discussion on a topic.
I am sorry, but you are still incorrect. There are a lot of people who do not go to for-profit schools who end up with 80k+ in debt from undergrad.
I am not sure how to be more clear about that.
Maybe you could post some links, or some other corroborating evidence. A lot of those articles you read lump in ALL debt: student loans, credit card debt, car loans, etc to make it sound worse.
That is quite the spin. Going from 150k to 300k on interest. There are too many variables after Med school to speculate on what happens to the debt. The article you linked is an example of a really dumb choice by one person. I do agree that 300k to pay off if you are making 250k is not a big deal.
There are Exceptions to every rule but they really are not relevant in a larger discussion on a topic.
Most of what I said about med school is from a few friends of mine who are currently residents. They tell me that out of their classes in med school, everyone averaged between $150k-200k in debt, assuming parents couldn't help out.
This is actually one of the reasons why there are so many specialists and not many family doctors among newly graduated med students. Family doctors make 100-200k less than specialists, and given the amount of debt a student has, it is hard to financially make the decision to be a family doctor.
If you went to harvard for undergrad, for example, you would end up with more than 40k in debt!
Not necessarily. Though only a sample size of four, I can give examples of those coming out debt-free (and their parents didn't pay anything). I am about to send someone to any Ivy league, and based on all the info about grants etc we have received... looks like it will be close to free (or less than $20K in loans).
Med students end up with around 300k in debt for medical school. I have a friend who just finished medical school, and he has $280k in debt from the program. With all due respect, you couldn't be more wrong.
Not even close. Having 3 direct relatives getting MD/PhD's from the top schools in the country (one of them turned down Harvard)... I may have a clue. Their debt was zero. (well, they had an obligation to either go into the army for 4 years, or do research for 6. Obviously the latter was a good choice).
If someone went to UMass Medical, the total cost for 4 years of med school (everything included, such as health insurance, disability insurance, rent, transportation etc) is only about $160K if you paid for it yourself.
The average debt balance of med students upon graduation is $156k. Again, that is average. After interest accrues during residency (when you are not making enough to pay back), you can absolutely have over a $300k balance in debt from medical school.
If you don't pay back anything on the $156K loan for the 4 years after med school, the interest rate would have to be 17% per year, compounded monthly, to turn the amount owed into $300K. Try again.
That being said, you are making a high salary, so typically it isn't a problem to pay back. Having $300k in debt and having a $250k salary is an OK tradeoff.
If I had gone to med school, instead of the engineering school I did, today, I would have saved some money. Geez.
As I said before, the average debt coming out of medical school in the United States is just north of $150k. Some people have more than that, some have less.
AAMC study from 2010 says mean debt for 4th year med students is $130k with a standard deviation of $79k. What I find interesting is that 1st year students have a mean debt of $146k, 2nd years $141k, 3rd years $132k.
So, your $300k in debt medical student is going to be in the z=2.152 range, or less than 3.5% of all medical students assuming normal distribution (though the median debt is $150k, so we actually have a negative skewed distribution and your $300k case is even more in the extreme than the 96.85 percentile.
Are there med students with $300k of debt? Yes. Are those students anywhere close to the norm? No. I would even go so far as asserting that when the number is that low, that we are almost certainly looking at cases where med school is not the only expenditure factoring into their debt load.
The reason I take issue with your statements is that many people read these forums seeking advice. I do not want people seeing your extreme cases and assuming that it is the norm to take on enormous debt to pay for school. It is quite possible, and common, to attend higher education without tremendous debt loads because of the way financial aid is structured, and anyone reading here looking for answers about post-secondary debt needs to realize that your examples and statements are extremes.
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