<p>Not pre-med but as the parent of a law school student, I will toss in my $.02.</p>
<p>The first part of financial aid for professional school is in the form of loans. As a graduate/professional student, your child will be able to borrow $20k in as a combination of subsidized and unsubsidized stafford loans each year they are in school.</p>
<p>The CAP of stafford loans for grad/professional students is $138,500. The CAP for med students is $224,000. This amount is reduced my the amount of stafford loan debt you took on as an undergrad. For example; your son has maxed out his stafford loans during undergran. He has 27,000 in undergrad stafford loan debt. He can borrow 40k a year in stafford loans for med school (which just puts a dent in the cost of med school per year). Your son will have $189,000 of debt in stafford loans alone (not counting other loans he may need for med school).</p>
<p>Until recently (within the last 2/3 years) students really needed to be careful in managing their debt if they wanted to go to professional school because one’s credit worthiness could be used as the basis for acceptance . (Penn law used to state in their application, that they would not admit you if you were not in a position to secure loans over the stafford loan limit). A student who borrows the full cost of attendance to attend law school is easly going to have $200k in law school debt alone after 3 years. A student attending med school will easily have $300k in med school debt alone.</p>
<p>In addition, because it was very likely that one was going to have to borrow for grad school, they wanted to have minimal undergrad debt so they could be in a better position to borrow the money they needed for grad school (without needing a cosigner).</p>
<p>The financial aid structure for law/med school is different than it is for undergrad. While the student is independent for FAFSA purposes having completed their first bachelors, if the student is under 27 and at some schools 30 years old the income and assets of the student, their parents and spouse (if married) will be used to assess thier eligibility for need based aid. So the parent who bit the bullet for 4 years of undergrad could still to be on the hook for a parent contribution if their child goes to med/law school.</p>
<p>Now grad & professional students can borrow the entire cost of their grad/law/med school through GradPlus loans from the federal government in their own name without a co-signer. There is not a big risk to the federal government because the loans cannot be dischargeable in bankruptcy, so they are going to be repaid. While credit worthiness, is not an issue like it was a couple of years ago,having a large amount of undergrad debt coupled with a large amount of professional school debt can seriously affect the lifestyle of a young doctor/lawyer (a young lawyer moreso because of the oversaturation of lawyers in the work place) when it comes to things likel getting married, purchasing a home, having kids, etc. With this in mind, the conventional wisdom has been go through undergrad with the least amount of debt since you will be occuring massive debt for med/law school.</p>
<p>hope this helps.</p>