Which is why I’m keeping the link to various programs/scholarships and the places + types of job offers my guy has actually received. It’s why I posted this thread to figure out if it was also specialty dependent.
Our Personal Finance course at school does a great job explaining loans of all sorts to kids, including costs of payback. They have to create a budget with their anticipated starting salary (from facts, not guesses) and see how much everything costs. I’ve seen kids go from being sure they were going to get a new Corvette to realizing that used Honda could be a good deal for a few years.
It’s likely why most kids pick their least expensive option for college. It’s common for me to ask, “Why X?” and get the response, “They were less expensive than Y/Z/anything else.”
I often feel like the Exchange Student on CC. The world I see on here is rarely like the one I encounter at my average public high school.
@Creekland
Another thing to mention to your students is that PA is not a great place to live in if you’re planning on med school. PA state med schools (Penn State, Temple, Pitt, maybe Geisinger?) are public-private hybrids and really don’t give much of an in-state tuition discount. (Instate tuition runs $53-58K/year)
PA state med schools also do not have a significant in-state admission preference.
Tell your students they may do better if they relocate to a less expensive state, work a year or two to establish residency and then apply to med school.
All of these states have med schools w/ tuition under $40K/year–and some are substantially less than $40K/year.
In the South: FL, NC, SC, GA, MS, LA, AL
In the Midwest: ND, SD, NE, KS, OK
In the Southwest: TX, NM, NV, AZ
Saving $15-25K/year over PA tuition times 4 years is pretty good chunk of change.
I would hate to know that the doctor who’s about to do my TAVR really wanted to be a rheumatologist, but chose interventional cardiology for the money.
A better policy option would be to increase compensation for pediatricians, family practitioners, internists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists, neurologists, physiatrists, and infectious disease physicians.
Market forces also play a role in determining salaries. An excess of physicians in certain specialties depresses compensation. Right now there are more emergency medicine specialists, radiation oncologists and pathologists than there are jobs so salaries in those specialties have gone down in recent years.
Specialties composed mostly of female physicians (pediatrics and OB/GYN) have lower overall compensations than male dominated ones–just because women doctors are paid less. Female physicians earn over $2M less over a career than their male peers, even when adjusted for specialty, hours worked, practice type and clinical revenue.
Using RVUs to determining billable services strongly favors procedures over office time, and some specialties over others. (Probably because the committee the AMA used at the time to determine value of each service for Medicare was largely made up of anesthesiologists and cardiologists.)
For example, if a women gets spinal anesthesia during labor, every time the anesthesiologist looks at her vitals remotely, that generates a billable RVU; however the Ob/Gyn who is also remotely monitoring the vital signs of both the laboring woman and the fetus cannot any generate RVUs for checking their vitals of either patient at any time during labor.
Additionally, Medicare, medicaid (and thus also private insurance) pay higher rates for the same service delivered in rural underserved areas than they do in urban underserved areas.
We are a dual primary care physician family. We have many friends in primary care and many in specialties, the vast majority make over 200k if they are full time, with some specialists making far more , and some teaching hospital specialists making less than some private peds. It just depends. However: almost all of us took out full loans for med school and all paid them back within 15 yrs of graduation (we did it faster to get it done). The Doctor mortgage helped lots of us: some version of that has been around since the early 2000s when we bought our first home with one of us still in school/one a resident, and when we bought our “permanent “ upgraded home several yrs later. There is plenty of income even in primary care. For both it was our calling, so it didn’t matter that it paid “less”, especially when we knew we would be easily able to pay off the loans.
I believe there have been some longitudinal studies done- and PA is the state with the highest percentage of adults who were born in-state and never left (except for military service) which certainly jives with my PA relatives and their attitudes about leaving!!!
We were discussing moving in a church small group once and a friend shared that he had moved away in the past, didn’t like it, and moved back. We asked where he moved to. It was a PA town 20 minutes away from where he lives now.
I’m not making this up… it floored us that he considered that “moving away.”
We’re odd that we’ve moved multiple times in our past, coming here from FL, but since we’ve moved here about 26 years ago we haven’t left. Maybe PA has a magnet of sorts? My kids have all left, but they were born in FL.
We are in similar places. My co-worker was crying at her daughter moving so far away. It’s 20 minutes. I kid you not. I also realized, I don’t think her parents (in their 80s) have ever been outside of a 2-3 hour radius from home. They are not abnormal for this area either.
