“Worth it” is in the eye of the beholder.
Will you be able to pay off your $250K debt as a physician? In most cases, yes, even if you’re not a highly paid private practice orthopedic surgeon.
Will paying off your debt hurt prevent you from living “the doctor’s lifestyle”? In most cases, the Maserati and second house in the Bahamas will be just a happy dream, but you won’t be living our of your aging Toyota Corolla like a bag person either.
Only if you become a doctor.
As there are issues like job satisfaction as to whether medicine is worth it, I’m assuming OP is talking about income. There may be better ways to “make money” but even with 250K+ debt, an MD should be able to have a nice life financially. A lot of that though will be about MD’s need to satisfy his/her ego/keeping up or ahead of the Joneses, but that is not peculiar to MDs.
Well, as a first year resident, my D. is very satisfied, despite of the very challenging schedule and the fact that she is in Prelim year, which means that she is not yet in her specialty, but rather in Internal Medicine.
In regard to worth it or not, it is worth for one person and not worth it for another, depending on how much person wants to be an MD.
And not everybody graduates with debt after Med. School. If one chooses to attend UG on full tuition Merit or close (assumption here that every single to be pre-med is a top of the top high caliber HS student who is eligible for such award at several places), then such a student may negotiate with parents paying for the Med. School or at least a good chunk of it. I heard that about 25% graduate from med. school w/o debt. Good planning and a wise decision making is a must here.
…forgot to add, that the financial is NOT the biggest challenge in becoming an MD.
There are much bigger challenges that include every single aspect of a human being, intellectual, emotional, physical, social, I bet there is something else that I simply missed. You will be pushed to absolute limits for some very long periods of time. The question is - are you ready to sustain this push? I would say that the financial side is the last of them all. First and foremost, got to be able to sustain being on this road… think about worth or not from this prospective, from your abilities in every single aspect of human being, financial is a very minor in comparison… As an example. there were few instances of Shingles among 20+ years olds in my D’s med. class. They were caused by extreme stress that they were going thru while preparing for Step 1 - up to 14 hours of study every day for about 7 weeks with some 2-3 days off. They had to do it not only to prepare the material for exam, but also to develop a “brain stamina” to be able to sit thru grueling long exam. The score in this single exam determines the entire future of MD. One cannot even re-take it to improve the score. Re-take is allowed only in the case of failure.
If you have to ask, then the answer is clearly no. There are just too many sacrifices, financial and otherwise, to make this worthwhile. Go in only if you love the material (because you’ll be studying for a very long time), love taking care of sick or ‘at risk’ people (because you’ll be doing a lot of doctoring for the rest of your career), and can handle the uncertainties of being part of a changing system with serious cost containment pressures, evolving technology and growing competition.
If the ‘worth it’ measurement is financial, I can assure you there are easier ways to make money.
Will you be in the top half or the bottom half of your medical school class?
If you had to divide them out, most of the MDs I know who graduated in the top half of their class say they could have done anything else, had a better life and made better money.
Those graduating the bottom half say Medicine has it’s problems, but it isn’t too bad overall.
Is that debt for med school? or undergrad??
@mom2collegekids the debt would be for medical school.
Only if you will graduate, be admitted to residency programs, be able to practice, and enjoy your career.
I know a gal who wanted to be a doctor badly (driven by family too) but did not get a license to practice because she was not selected for residency.
The majority of parents cannot fund medical schools for their children. So most students have to borrow.
@coolweather oh… wow I did not know you have to be selected for a residency program, well now I know.
I don’t know about residency selection rate for students graduating from US medical schools. That student went to a Caribbean med school.
Around 5% not matched to residency programs:
For details about the Match, see: http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Main-Match-Results-and-Data-2015_final.pdf
“Considering a debt around $250,000+, is medical school worth it?”
Good question.
I am less and less certain that med school is worth the time/cost.
The big money is going more and more to companies that manage care - and less and less to providers of care (doctors).
This is the main reason I have not encouraged my kids to do medicine.
I myself am pondering getting an MBA to expand my options for a position in healthcare management in the future.
If you can’t beat them, join them.
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I know a gal who wanted to be a doctor badly (driven by family too) but did not get a license to practice because she was not selected for residency.
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Yikes! And when you consider that she probably has debt for that Carib med school, ugh!!!
Anyway…debt of $250k for a US MD school is not a big risk. It’s probably pretty much in the range of average debt for MD graduates.
@PharmacyStudent Yes, you have to be matched into a residency program. Imagine if there wasn’t such a process. We can’t have 90% of graduating MD selecting Dermotology, right? And, we don’t want the “weakest” MD grads going into specialties that require the “best of the best” (for example: neurosurgery)
Med students tend to gravitate towards applying for specialties that best suit their interests and their medical school stats. But, they must get matched into the residency thru the National Resident Match Program. (The app process into med school is only half the battle!!)
“Around 5% not matched to residency programs”-This is probably an average number. Some selective specialties are facing 40% not matched and it has been increasing from year to year An average number does not mean anything. On the other hand, if you believe that you can sustain the push and perform at the highest level, the sky is the limit.
It depends. There are some select specialists that start VERY high could pay this within the first year or two. For a GP, probably not.
@mom2collegekids Just curious - do you know what residency specialty the weakest MD students get matched to (not the 5% who don’t get matched, the rest, right above those)? I would think that any premed hopeful should feel comfortable with the specialty they could end up with. Most premed undergrads go in with stars in their eyes- they will all be in the high paid ‘sexy’ specialties - they plan to become Surgeons, Cardiologists or Anesthesiologists , but I believe most end up somewhere else.
First, let me correct one thing—that 5% unmatched is the number unmatch after the main Match. After SOAP, 99.5% of all US senior allopathic med grads have matched into a residency position.
SOURCE: [Main Residency Match–Post-SOAP Numbers](http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2016-MRM-infographic-post-SOAP.jpg)
For this year, the “easiest” Match was in internal medicine–because the largest number of med grads matched into it, because IM has the largest number of available residency positions and because IM has the lowest fill rate of US allopathic med grads.
(FWIW, cardiology is an internal medicine subspecialty; it requires 3 years additional fellowship training after IM has been completed. Going from IM → cards is not extremely competitive simply because most of the selection has already been done at the residency level since to be considered for a cards fellowship, residency must be done at an academic center or at very highly ranked community IM program. Most IM residencies aren’t at those types of programs. Surgery is only moderately competitive with a 93% Match rate and average STEP scores. Anesthesiology is one of those specialties where interest is declining due to encroachment from other professions and the number of available anesthesia residency slots was reduced this year.)
I agree that most pre-meds (and high school students in particular) have no clue about what their eventual medical career will look like because they haven’t had any real exposure to various specialties. But there is ample research showing that med students choose their specialty not by potential income but by personality/values match.
In general, residencies are ranked as being high, intermediate or low in competitiveness.
You can look at WUSTL's list of specialty descriptions here: [Choosing</a> a Specialty--Specialty Descriptions](<a href="https://residency.wustl.edu/Choosing/SpecDesc/Pages/Home.aspx%5DChoosing">https://residency.wustl.edu/Choosing/SpecDesc/Pages/Home.aspx)
However, WUSTL's ranking is misleading in that it only considers the number of med grads applying to X specialty vs number of med grads who Matched in X specialty. Thus specialties like anesthesia and and diagnostic radiology are ranked as low competitive because almost all students who applied in those fields found a residency position. (You also need to realize that residencies even in low competitive specialties have within the specialty residencies that are hard to match into vs places that are relatively easy to match into. For example, matching into a top academic pediatric residency is often just as difficult or even more difficult than matching into a neurosurgery or orthopedics residency.)
Matching into a particular specialty also requires appropriate STEP scores and clinical grades (and sometime research and other activities like away rotations and strong LORs from specialists in the field).
For example, radiation oncology was ranked by WUSTL as a low competitive specialty because 96% of US seniors applying for rad onc matched, but the STEP scores required to be considered for rad onc are the highest of any specialty and rad onc often also requires an advanced degree (MS, PhD) to be considered.
For data about what scores & grades are typical for each specialty--you can see those here: [Charting the Outcomes of the Match 2016--US Allopathic Seniors](<a href="http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Charting-Outcomes-US-Allopathic-Seniors-2016.pdf">http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Charting-Outcomes-US-Allopathic-Seniors-2016.pdf</a>)
Med schools are very, very good at discouraging students who have no chance at matching into a specialty from applying in those fields.
Also realize that the absolute competitiveness of specialties changes from year-to-year, both as specialties become more or less "trendy" (EM is trending up while anesthesiology is trending down) and as the number of residency slots offered change. (For example, the number of IM slots has increased last year, while the number of diagnostic radiology slots decreased.)