<p>If I have to pay for college on my own, and plan on going to Med School, is it still possible to go to my dream school for full tuition, or a school I do not want to go to that is much cheaper? </p>
<p>I know it sounds almost pretentious on the surface, but if I work hard enough, I could pay off my loans. Or is this almost impossible?</p>
<p>In other words, do I follow where I truly want to be - having to pay the price.</p>
<p>Or settle for a school that is much cheaper?</p>
<p>You cannot take government loans over $5500 a year, and it is not advisable to take on too much debt.</p>
<p>Med school is expensive. You might as well save as much money as possible during undergrad. I will likely face this same decision, and I would personally choose the cheapest option. Note that the “lowest” school I am applying to is my state flagship- a research university that will provide me with ample opportunities in my major ;if your cheapest option is a school that may or may not prepare you for med school, you may want to reconsider. </p>
<p>This is a very general question you’ve asked, with no easy answer. One, what is your dream school? Do you even have a solid shot of getting in? Keep in mind any school with a sub 15% admit rate is a reach for everyone. Two, what would the cost difference be? Does your dream school meet 100% of financial need, or offer merit aid? Three, how much can your family afford? Have you talked to them about your school list and the potential costs associated with each, and if they could contribute at all? The way you worded your question, it seems as if your parents plan on contributing nothing. Is that because your parents can’t afford it (meaning you might get significant need-based financial aid at many institutions), or just because they don’t want to? Have you run the free financial aid calculators on your potential schools’ websites? As to if you could pay off your loans, that is entirely dependent on factors you haven’t provided, including how much those loans would be. Keep in mind that your potential career path may also change and you may not end up going to med school. For us at CC to give you any sort of a useful answer, you’re going to have to provide more information then a generalized question asked by thousands of students each year. </p>
<p>“or a school I do not want to go to that is much cheaper?”</p>
<p>Your safeties should be schools you would want to go to. You do not want to spend 4 years at place that would seemingly be miserable to you regardless, yes? </p>
<p>What would be the reason you don’t want to attend the cheaper college? Is it too big, or doesn’t have the “allure” of your dream school?</p>
<p>When it comes to thinking about med school, go to a university that has good research oppurtunities and inexpensive. State flagships typically offer all of these opportunities, so long you maintain a good GPA. However, “prestigious” schools are sometimes able to offer a lot of financial aid.</p>
<p>Your dream school could be an inexpensive school; they’re not mutually exclusive. I got a full merit scholarship to my top-choice college.</p>
<p>Personally, I think college-bound seniors should eliminate terminology like “dream school” from their vocabulary. It just sets you up for unfulfilled lofty expectations. Most of the time, the “dream school” is a fantasy set-up anyway - students get attached to certain schools for often small reasons or imagined/exaggerated ones, like the prestige of the school plus the glossy marketing campaigns these schools set up. The media and the marketing campaigns make you dream about sitting on a lawn in front of hundred-year-old ivy-covered buildings talking Proust with your world-class classmates or something. It’s such a crock. It’s not that things like that don’t happen - but they happen at MOST colleges across the country. You don’t have to go to Brown or Amherst for it to happen; it happened at my small top-100-but-bottom-50 historically black women’s LAC where the average SAT score was below the national average. Even the ivy part, lol. You can have a great college experience at UGA or Alabama or UIUC or even Western Washington or UMN-Duluth. </p>
<p>Instead, you should have a range of schools at which you would be happy - most college-bound seniors would be happy at a variety of schools, including their state flagship or a regional campus. There are many great colleges that are in the second tier that offer excellent large merit aid to top scholars, because they are trying to attract the best students to their schools. Often it’s not because they are bad, but because they are in less desirable locations, or don’t spend as much money on marketing as other schools (two that come to mind are Lawrence University in Appleton, WI and Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA).</p>
<p>With that said, it depends on how much debt. Generally speaking you cannot borrow more than the federal limits of $5,500 your first year, $6,500 your second year and $7,500 your final two or three years. That’s also limited to a lifetime max of $31,000 for undergrad. Generally speaking I don’t think that undergraduates should borrow more than that for undergrad, as most of them can’t expect to start at much more than around $40,000 with a bachelor’s degree and borrowing more than the limit makes repayment difficult.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter how hard you work; if you make $45,000 you can’t expect to be able to repay loans in excess of $60K. It’s just untenable. You’ll be struggling to just get by, and will have a huge weight on your shoulders for the next 20-30 years (because you will need to do extended repayment just to barely afford the debt).</p>
<p>Most students who start out premed don’t end up going to medical school, either because they find a better career for their personal desires or because they couldn’t get into med school. But even if you do go to medical school, your medical education will cost at least $150,000 and perhaps as much as $250-300,000. Except for an extraordinary few that is mostly financed through loans. Physicians do make decent upper-middle-class money, but they’re not astoundingly rich; I think general practitioners average about $180,000 a year, and specialists maybe between $250,000 and $400,000 depending on the specialty (surgeons are on the high end, but most specialists probably won’t make more than $300,000). My sense is that physicians themselves struggle to repay the medical school loans that they have even without crushing undergraduate debt.</p>
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<p>That is still a very high income by US standards ($180,000 per year is top 2% of individual income and top 6% of household income in the US), but that comes only after a long delayed entry into the work force (4 years college + 4 years medical school + 3 to 6 years residency = 11 to 14 years from starting college) and the accumulation of huge amounts of medical school debt (4 years of medical school tuition, fees, and insurance (not including living expenses which can tack on another $80,000 or so over 4 years) can range from about $50,000 (Puerto Rico resident at UPR) to $330,000 (non-South-Carolina-resident at USC) with probably $220,000 being typical; see [url=<a href=“https://services.aamc.org/tsfreports/select.cfm?year_of_study=2014]here[/url”>https://services.aamc.org/tsfreports/select.cfm?year_of_study=2014]here[/url</a>]; residency is paid, but not enough to do much to pay down medical school debt).</p>
<p>Assuming $300,000 in medical school debt after completing residency and a $180,000 per year income (about $130,000 to $140,000 after paying income and payroll taxes), it is theoretically possible to pay off the debt in a small number of years. But that requires continuing to live cheaply like a college or medical school student, and not have either startup costs of your own practice or events in your personal life like marriage, kids, tuition for SO/spouse education, etc…</p>
<p>a very poor article in the Washington Post about college debt’s effect on the housing market has a quote from one of Ben Bernanke’s testimonies before Congress in which he is pointing out that his son would leave medical school with 400K in debt.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/student-debt-may-hurt-housing-recovery-by-hampering-first-time-buyers/2014/02/17/d90c7c1e-94bf-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/student-debt-may-hurt-housing-recovery-by-hampering-first-time-buyers/2014/02/17/d90c7c1e-94bf-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html</a></p>
<p>We need more and much better articles on the trickle down effect of large college debt on the rest of the economy. It is not just these consumers who are hurt by poor decision-making by parents, misguided government policies, and rising college costs.</p>