This is the same price as going to UCLA and perhaps grad school/med school!
I don’t see a difference. This child cannot get Resident status because the family resides OOS.
Living independently is VERY, VERY expensive in California. Rents in our area are $3000 per month (1 bedroom) and the student is not allowed to receive any help from family or friends. They must pay State and Federal taxes and must be entirely self-supporting with detailed documentation.
I personally would not recommend this level of debt for the undergrad portion of college and especially when the student has a free ride at a great flagship university in their home state.
OP stated it is a loan, not need based aid that does not need to be repaid so I am assuming it is may be a University Loan listed here?
University loans are awarded to undergraduate students, BASED ON FINANCIAL NEED. University loans have FIXED INTEREST RATES, currently set at 5%. Interest on loans begins to accrue 6-9 months after graduation or 6-9 months after the student drops below half time enrollment. This can vary between types of loans. If you get a university loan, we will send you more info of the loan’s terms. This is given as part of the students Financial Aid Notification.
@loolooo
I agree with the consensus that going to UCLA will not give her an advantage for a CA medical school and the extra debt is not worth it.
Ok…so a $20,000 University Loan…and then $50,000 in additional loans to pay for UCLA?
TANSAFL
(There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch)
The military may pay for her undergrad tuition IF she serves a full term of enlistment (which can be between 2 and 6 years of active duty) and the military may not pay 100% of her tuition & fees. How much it pays depends on how long she serves and what her role in the military was.
ROTC scholarships requires up to 6 years of active duty service after college. She would need to ask for and receive permission from her chain of command to attend medical school. Permission is not automatic and she could be turned down. Several branches of the armed services are reducing their number of physicians.
Has your daughter talked with her recruiter about if she meets the physical and medical qualifications for military service? If she hasn’t had her intake physical, you don’t know if she will even qualify for military service or ROTC. (See here for a list–https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/disqualifiers-medical-conditions.html#:~:text=(1)%20Deformities%2C%20disease%20or,or%20the%20satisfactory%20completion%20of)
If your daughter does ROTC, then has the military pay for her medical education through HPSP {Health Professions Scholarship Program) or USUSOM (Uniformed Services University School of Medicine), then her branch of the service will own her services for at least a decade and half AFTER she completes her medical residency. She must enroll in a military residency program and she may not get to choose her medical specialty. (The needs of the service come first. Pediatrics is not a specialty that military has a high need for.)
OR, your daughter could take her free ride at U of Arizona and be free do whatever she wants with her future.
We think we can provide her maybe 100-150k coverage but yes the 20k is need based loan.
can she choose not to have military pay off her medical school? I didn’t know about the permission to attend medical school. thank you.
Sorry if I wasn’t clearer in original post. we would cover maybe 100k, 200k maximum. that would leave her 400k in loans
If we cover her undergrad expenses at ucla, she will have to pay for medical school entirely. For the 8 years we can pay 100-200k maybe…,300k (which will cover undergrad) if we use up all of our retirings/savings (but that extra 100k is for our other family members back home who need medical assistance). unsure
also - thank you for your help.
Please do not use up all of your retirement or savings - getting a free ride to UofA is an amazing offer.
And agree on the military physical - our daughter’s classmate was not accepted into ROTC due to an undiscovered medical condition that came out with the very detailed physical (blood work, etc).
Take the free ride!!
Have you done the math on how heavily that will saddle her during her career?!? That’s a HUGE debt load.
I know the prestige of getting into UCLA, but think about the prestige of getting a FREE RIDE at Arizona!
Additionally, your daughter’s odds of being an instate med student at University of Arizona are probably more in her favor than instate CA kids trying to get an acceptance in CA.
No. If she applies and is accepted into the HPSP or USU program, she is contractually obligated to complete her full military service obligation. The minimum payback time for either program is 6 years of active duty service after the completion of a military medical residency, plus the amount of any other service obligation she has incurred thru a ROTC scholarship program.
If she does ROTC or a military reservist program, she must receive permission from her chain of command if she wants to enroll in med school. If she does receive permission to attend med school, then her service obligation will be postponed until after she has completed med school–and maybe residency. Further postponing her service obligation post med school again requires getting permission from her chain of command. Getting permission to complete a civilian residency is not automatic and only sometimes allowed. But she will still owe her full service obligation for her undergrad funding even if she doesn’t accept any money from the military for med school.
D1 and D2 had several former and active duty service members in their medical class. D2 had a good friend who was active duty as a sniper with a forward force team and did 3 tours of duty in Afghanistan before he was discharged from the service due to service-related injuries. His veteran’s disability retraining program paid for 100% of his med school. D1 had a classmate who was doing HPSP and he matched in ophthalmology (only 2 ophtho residency slots for all military service branches combined–so the guy was a top student), but he planned to be a career military physician and do his 20 years of service in the Air Force. D1 also has a close friend from residency who is a ROTC and HPSP recipient. She served 2 years active duty in the Navy between undergrad and getting permission to attend med school, then was pulled out of her military residency in OB/GYN after her intern year for training as a dive physician attached to a SEAL team. (Needs of the service.) After she completed her 2 years of duty with her SEAL team, she received permission to do a civilian residency in emergency medicine. (Needs of the service.) She is currently a Navy reservist and does one or two service tours a year as well serving 3 days/month. It will take years and years and years to pay back her service obligation since reserve service is prorated and requires a longer payback period than full time active duty does. She’s doing reserve service because she’s married to a man who has a job that is not-relocatable–meaning they would need to live separately while she was finishing her service obligation-- and they have young children at home.
No, please do NOT allow your child to take out $400k in loans!!! That’s a staggering amount of money that will cripple her financially for decades. Maybe even for life.
She won’t be allowed to take that much in loans until she’s 23 I think. Just no.
One of my patients just finished paying off his loans. He’s 62. 
You must have an outdated and inflated idea of how lucrative most medical careers are, to be even toying with the idea of a completely unnecessary 400K in undergraduate debt. With all due respect, how are you even considering this?? That debt load would most likely more than double by the time she finished med school. Medical residents do not make much money. Early-career doctors don’t get amazing salaries either.
And for what? To attend a different flagship public university in a different state? Why?
There are so, so many ramifications to this. Have you read about how many young people these days are concluding that they cannot afford to marry a partner with significant student debt?
Classes at UofA begin in less than three weeks. Your daughter should be shopping for dorm bedding and getting excited about going to college. Is this desire to consider alternatives to a FREE college education coming from her, or from you? She literally cannot make a decision to go to UCLA without your buy-in, because you would have to take out the loans. Please, for everyone’s sake, shut this down and commit to the wonderful plan your daughter already had.
I have been reading this thread without commenting. However I strongly agree with the consensus that UCLA is too expensive, will not help with medical school admissions (at least not compared to U of A), U of A is a great choice, and a free ride is great also.
Neither of our daughters were premed, but both of our daughters had majors that overlapped a great deal with premed classes (one is currently studying for a DVM, the other is currently doing biotech research). As such they both had a lot of experience with premed classes, and they both have friends who were premed (a few of whom are either in medical school or are MDs right now).
There are a LOT of universities that are very good for premed. Your in-state public university is one of them. UCLA is another of them. There are more than 100 more. Medical school admissions will depend upon grades, and references, and MCAT scores, and medical experience. It will not depend upon whether your daughter attend U of A or UCLA. Either one would be very good from an academic point of view.
Premed classes will be tough, and will be full of very strong students. This is true at any “top 100” university and probably at any “top 200” university. There will be exams that are very challenging. There will be a lot of homework.
Medical school will be expensive.
Both of our daughters graduated university with no debt. This was a HUGE help to both of them particularly in terms of what they did next. It sounds like you have the opportunity to do the same thing and I think that this will help your daughter quite a bit as well.
It is mentioned somewhere above that it is possible to graduate university, move to a different state, establish residency, and then apply to an in-state MD program in the new state. Our daughter did exactly this before applying to DVM programs, and it worked well. Moving to the other state was far easier because she had no debt. She was however able to find a dream job that she loved and that gave her some experience that was very helpful to her DVM applications, and start to establish residency. However, she could only afford to take it and live on her own because she had no debt (since it was a dream job, it could pay relatively badly).
In the original post you mentioned “research and biotech”. This is what our other (younger) daughter is doing. It is going quite well. I had heard that it was hard to get a well paying job with just a bachelor’s degree in biology. Our daughter’s experience was very different. However, I think that the key here is that while she was an undergraduate student she discovered that she loved lab work. From that point on while the undergraduate premed students were getting medical experience, my daughter was in a lab doing research. The job that she got at least to me sounded a great deal like what she was already doing as a student. However, this is a detail that your daughter can figure out while she is a student. She can get some medical volunteering experience, get some lab experience, and find out which is more appealing to her.
Getting a bachelor’s degree from U of A with no debt can open up quite a few options that might be much harder to get for a student who graduates with a large debt load.
Do not give up a full ride to Arizona and take out huge loans to UCLA. Those loans will be extremely difficult to pay back and will be a big thorn on your side for decades.
Arizona is a perfectly good school for premed. You also mentioned research and biotech. Your daughter got a full ride scholarship? Excellent! She clearly has what it takes to achieve success. Take that and run with it.
So you are suggesting that you would use up all of your savings and retirement savings for undergrad school at UCLA…and also not be able to help other family members back home who need medical assistance? Really? Please don’t do this. You and the rest of your family are just as important as this one student about to enter college.
The funding of college needs to consider all family financial obligations…not just this one student.
I think you have been misled about what UCLA at basically full cost of attendance (loans and ALL of your savings) will do to help your daughter. Think of this…even with your help, she will have $80,000 in loans leaving undergrad school…which is a LOT. And then she will have medical school loans on top of that.
If she does decide to move someplace and establish instate residency there after undergrad, she will have about $900 a month in just loan payments for undergrad. That’s a lot of money.
The gift of no loans or costs to attend Arizona will give her many more options when she graduates undergrad…because she won’t have loans to pay back at that time.
As I mentioned in your other string of posts, if you think there are struggles being first generation in this country, think about the struggles of having too much debt.
Your daughter won’t have an easier chance of getting accepted to any medical school just because she goes to UCLA.
Just four days ago, you determined that UMKC was too costly at roughly the same price as UCLA. Suddenly, the money is there for UCLA? That makes absolutely no sense at all.
Has your daughter already paid her enrollment deposit to Arizona?