Hi,
I have a daughter who will hopefully not incur any debt for undergrad (no financial aid, all merit aid) but she is also believing she might want to be a doctor. I have not really researched medical schools much but know how expensive they are and I am wondering if there are merit scholarships for those years as well? If so, are certain schools more apt to offer them to top achievers (if she ended up being one of those that is!!)? Thanks!
It’s unlikely. Schools offer scholarships to attract top students. Medical schools don’t have that problem. Every student that goes to medical school already has top grades. After you reach a certain point in grades, scores and accomplishment, it becomes virtually impossible to stand out.
Well that is unfortunate! yes, that makes total sense I suppose. So if there is no money saved for medical school, is the student allowed to get loans for those huge amounts? or is it the parents that have to get the loans in our names?
Following along - DD is considering the same path and I wonder as well.
When my DS went to Physical Therapy school he was able to obtain the loans to cover without the same hurdles as undergraduates encounter.
Students are typically the ones who take out the student loans for themselves. I believe after they have their undergraduate, they are considered fully independent students and have access to all those loans. A med school financial aid office would be able to give more detailed answers.
@FrozenMaineMom
@SnowflakeDogMom
There are a very, very, very limited number of merit awards available for med school-- and those are typically only offered at lower ranked private medical schools and only to exceptionally desirable potential matriculants. (Think multiple top 10 med school accepted students.) State med schools do not offer merit (they simply don’t have the money) or if they do offer merit, it’s token amount at best (few hundred to a few thousand).
The vast majority of medical students take out federal student loans and Grad Plus loans to finance med school. The median loan debt of newly graduated med students is ~$200K. (Note: the median skews low because a full 25% of all med students graduate with ZERO medical school debt. Primarily due to Bank of Mom & Dad financing and service-for-scholarship programs.)
Professional school students are considered independent students for federal education loans and will file their own FAFSA. However, all private and some public med schools still require parental financial information until applicants are in their mid-30s–even if the student is married and/or has been self-supporting for many years. Parental financial info is collected by NeedsAccess (which is like the CSS Profile on steroids). A family EFC for med school will be given.
Medical students can borrow up to $40,500/year in federal student loans. Students with good credit ratings can borrow up to a school’s published COA through the Grad Plus loan program. All loans for medical school are unsubsidized and interest begins to accrue immediately upon disbursement.
There are 5-6 meets-full-need medical schools (Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Duke, Chicago?). Even at these generous FA schools, students are required to take a base or unit loan (typically $40,500/year), plus pay a parental EFC AND a student contribution before need-based aid kicks in.
The cost of medical school is staggering, COAs run from about $40-45K (public med schools in a small number of states, in-state tuition) to over $120K per year (private med schools or OOS at a public med school).
Here is a link to a series of Excel spreadsheets showing the cost of each med school in the US.
https://www.aamc.org/data/tuitionandstudentfees/
Unfortunately Maine does not have its own public med school, nor are Maine students considered in-state for admission & tuition purposes at any other med schools.
@FrozenMaineMom
@SnowflakeDogMom
There are several changes on the horizon that may change how med students finance their educations:
There is a new proposed annual and lifetime limit on the amount of federal education loans a med student can borrow. Currently, med students can borrow up to $40,500/year and $224,000 lifetime. The new proposed annual limit is $20,500/year, with a maximum lifetime limit of $125,000.
Congress will likely eliminate the Grad Plus loan program. This means med students will need to use private education loans (with a qualified co-signer) to help pay for med school costs in excess of federal student loans.
The Federal Loan Forgiveness program will be eliminated or severely curtailed. This the almost 100% sure to happen.
Currently physicians who work for an eligible non-profit 503c organization can have any remaining loan balance forgiven after 10 years of on time loan payments. However, physicians and other high-income earners were never the intended recipients of the loan forgiveness program. Congress will either eliminate loan forgiveness eligibility for physicians or cap the amount forgiven. (Probably at $40K.)
As a FYI, most physicians–unless directly employed by a public hospital–do not work for eligible non-profits. Most hospital-based physicians are employed by a physicians’ group that is contracted to work at a particular hospital. Its a subtle distinction, but enough to disqualify a doctor from loan forgiveness eligibility.
Thank you for ALL of that detailed yet horribly depressing info!! 
Looks like we better start buying some lottery tickets in my house…
Or you could just move to TX.
https://www.famemaine.com/maine_grants_loans/doctors-for-maine-future-scholarship/
@FrozenMaineMom there is this program in Maine for Maine residents.
The Doctors for Maine’s Future scholarship program maxes out at $25K. The COA at Tuft is over $93K/year. (Tufts is THE most expensive medical school in the US.)
Lots of med schools would cost less than Tufts even with the scholarship reducing the COA. Plus her D would not be constrained in her choice of specialties or where she could practice after residency.
They exist but are several orders of magnitude harder to get and even closer to impossible at the top schools. E.g. had a friend at Brown given a full COA grant to his state med school (i.e. including money for books, housing, food etc). Given 0 dollars in merit aid from HMS (where he went) and not sure how much, if any, of his FA package was grant money vs. loans.
There are more scholarships at state schools than WOWMom lets on. They are rare, they mostly are small, but there are some that are significant.
My state medical school had really high criteria to maintain eligibility for the big scholarships (think top 10% of the class), which is one way to keep the costs lower. Out of the five students who got the COA level money first year, only one made it through all 4 years with the scholarship intact. Three of the five lost it after the first year.
Weird.
^^Almost exactly the opposite at our state school. MS1 thru MS3–token scholarships of $1-2K. The bigger scholarships are awarded to MS3-4 students.
Not quite. A good friend’s kid had merit offers from top 15 med schools. But then, he was an exceptional candidate. (One A- at Caltech, Scholar-Athlete, and a 44 on the old mcat without really trying.)
If I recall, at most the offers were half tuition.
But in general, yes, merit aid at med schools is not much when it exists.
I disagree to some extent. You have many opportunities to cut the outrageous cost of medical school, ranging from seeking out a free or low cost medical school (the texas state schools, case western Cleveland clinic, and md PHD. Program), to the lowest regular cost medical school (the state flagship or a school with a special mission) and yes, merit aid. The top medical schools absolutely offer merit aid, particularly if you are a strong candidate. Unlike undergraduate, you can ask for merit aid after acceptance if you are choosing between schools. Where I agree is that these opportunities may not be available to even the regular exceptional student likely to get into medical school but they are not as limited as indicated.
However, what this means, for those going into the next cycle, is that you need to start planning before you enter the undergraduate program. Does the research you select mean that you will obtain an exceptional reference? Is your clinical experience the type that would impress a medical school admissions committee. Are your grades outstanding, even among medical students. I know this runs counter to the advice that you should not worry so early, and it does not mean that you must go to medical school if you start planning early but the cost of medical school, and the difficulty of admission, is so shockingly high, that figuring out junior year in college and how to get in and pay for it is way too late.
If you are interested in lowering the cost of medical school, my advice is to a) have careful and detailed discussion with the pre-health departments at any potential undergraduate program asking pointed questions involving admissions and scholarships. Although the quality of the undergraduate program may line up roughly with prestige, the actual performance of students from that program is more important than pure prestige. And it also may not be the cheapeast program. Some debt for undergraduate is appropriate if it can lower the cost of medical school later.
For example, if you live in Texas and a Texas university is a feeder school to one of the outstanding low cost medical schools in Texas, that school might be a far better choice than a prestigious school in the Northeast that sent one student to a Texas medical school in the past three years. B). Become familiar with the medical schools and their costs by reviewing medical school sites and resources to see if the undergraduate program has provided many students or merit scholars to that school, if you can. Don’t just trust the undergraduate presentations. There is also ample secondary material. Medical school admissions is brutal and many students and families figure that out far too late.
The obvious place to check for this information is your home states medical school. If the school you pick has not sent many students to your home flagship, I would think twice about it. If not directly available, try reaching out to students at that school if you can to learn about scholarships and the like. I know this sounds depressing, but medical school is approaching $400,000. Its not getting cheaper and staring at that cost when it is just around the corner is pretty bad. Even if you are already in college, now is the time to think about it. I do think, though, that even though this early planning runs counter to the study what you want and find yourself concept, if the planning is thorough enough, it should allow for plenty of time for a full college experience.
If you are lucky enough to get into Columbia Med in future, they claim to have eliminated all loans. However, what I expect will happen is that they will admit kids without money upto the amount their funding lasts and admit well off kids for the remaining seats.
Penn gives out about 30+ full tuition scholarships.
Several of the Texas schools offer some level of tuition scholarships but the tuition is comparably low at around 20k. I have know UT Houston OOS students get scholarships to match in state tuition but usually they only have about 10-15 seats for OOS.
Cleveland Clinic offers tuition free medical school - https://atlantisglobal.org/blog/2017/11/21/get-paid-in-medical-school-my-journey-to-the-cleveland-clinic-lerner-college-of-medicine
The tough road to free medical education is MD/PhD or serve in the military.
Some of these choices are made by students who want to attend a specific school vs making specific financial choices. Someone I know chose a top med school with some financial aid as soon as they were admitted as opposed to waiting for the packages despite interviewing at many other schools and getting admitted.
MD/PhD is not a cost-effective route. You’re giving up 4 years of senior attending level salary which, depending on specialty, could easily be >$800k and possibly several million dollars in order to save 100k + interest.
@i-wanna-be-brown. I understand the arguments as to why MD/PhD is not a cost effective route, and the extra schooling should not be undertaken lightly, but I highlighted it for several reasons. First, it is an option for students who are interested in becoming physician-scientists and you not only attend for free, you also receive some type of stipend. So, it is important to understand that if your interests lean in that direction, it is affordable. Second, while I agree that the MD/Ph.D route is not a financial windfall, because you are losing several years of employment, I am not sold it is a huge loss either if a student is not destined for a lucrative specialty. Here is why. If you end up borrowing 400,000 dollars for for years of medical school, you will be unable to significantly pay back that amount while in residency, meaning that after eight years you will owe more than 400,000 and have a 400,000 debt. If you are in MD/Ph.d., after eight years you will owe little or nothing. At that point, paths diverge. If your intention is to go into a high paying specialty, and you qualify, then four years of that speciality at say three hundred thousand dollars a year is perhaps 800,000 and so you are out that money if you are able to pay back the 400,000 of loans on a three hundred thousand dollar a year salary (not as easy as it sounds). The recipient of the MD/PHD perhaps would then go to residency and so after twelve years he would owe nothing and have saved a little. So, I agree that if a medical student is destined for a high paying specialty, and comfortable paying back loans with a high salary by going into private practice, the MD Ph. D is not financially sound. But if the student does not want to go into private practice, or wants a salaried position (and many doctors are salaried today), or wants to do research, the 400,000 debt will be a financial albatross. Regardless, the key point is that medical school is so expensive that it requires years of planning and not just throwing out an appplication.