I’m a junior in high school and I’m thinking about pre-med, majoring in environmental science. I have a 4.3 W GPA and 3.85 UW GPA, ~1500 SAT and PSAT (probably going to be NMF). I have 800+ hours volunteering as well as paid work experience and have multiple science related extracurriculars as well founding a local environmental conservation club/charity.
I have a $250,000 college fund and possibly another $100,000 towards college/med school if I need it and my parents are feeling generous. I know this gives me a really big advantage in life and I’m very thankful for this opportunity, however, there is no possible way at all I will ever qualify for need-based financial aid.
What are my best options for the pre-med, med school combination. Should I be attending a cheap undergraduate school and what are some decent schools that might give me merit based aid?
Baylor is my dream school right now, but full-tuition merit aid to Baylor is not a guarantee.
Basically, what do I do with my college fund?
Medical school can be $400k or so (could be less if you get lucky, but you should not expect to be able to choose a medical school by price if you get in, since most successful pre-meds get one medical school admission out of dozens of applications).
So if you earn a free ride to college and use $350k toward medical school, you will finish medical school with about $50k in debt, which will be far less of an issue when you make your career and life choices after medical school rather than focusing on how to pay off the debt.
If you make NMF, the range of colleges with large merit scholarships that you may be able to get increases significantly.
If you are NMF, then Arizona State will give you a full tuition ride scholarship out of state. You could apply (and will almost assuredly be admitted) to the Barrett Honors College, which is very good–maybe the best honors college out there. You would be surrounded by lots of NMFs. Your only costs would be living expenses and a few college fees. Probably get out of undergraduate for $85K-$90K or so.
The other thing you have in Tempe/Phoenix is the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. If you volunteer or do some type of internship there, it has to look good on a med school application. https://mayo.asu.edu/
Then you would have $160K (with another $100K from your parents) for med school. You could have all of your education paid for with a med degree at the end. No debt is key.
If you knew with certainty that med school was in your future it would make sense to minimize your undergraduate cost. However the reality is that likely less than 10% of high school seniors that say they are premed actually start med school.