Hi everyone,
I'm researching med schools and a big deal for me is the debt i will be in after I complete the program.
My favorites are University of Washington, (I would get in state tuition thru WWAMI) Duke and Mayo. Duke and Mayo offer awesome merit scholarships. Dukes web site claims that the average indeptness of students is only like $65000. Mayo is similiar.
As you can tell these are pretty elite schools. I need some other schools to look into that are fairly affordable (my goal is to stay below $100,000)
Please comment if any of you have info.
Thanks,
You might want to look at schools that assume independence from your parents after age 30 (assuming you're over 30), and cap loans at 80,000. This is actually a large number of schools, and I think it would be possible to put together a whole list of them. Off the top of my head I think Stanford, Yale, and UCSF all qualify; but I'm sure that there are others.
Good luck!
sf/boston joe
Joe,
I didn't know that. Any ideas on how one could find out which schools do that?
Beth
Joe,
What to mean by capping at 80,000. Does that mean the school expects you to pay for the expensises in excess of 80,000, or does that mean the education won't cost more than 80,000?
I am actually only 21, but I am married and have 2 kids, so I think I qualify as independent.
Thanks for you help.
Each school is different, so this will really vary. However, many schools cap loans at 80,000, meaning that they ask you for whatever your expected family contribution is, make you take out 80,000 in loans, and then try to pay for the rest of the cost. If your expected family contribution is 0 this may end up meaning you getting a check from the school for living expenses, but this would not be true of many people (including people with assets, income, or spouses with either). Not all schools do this, but some do. The only thing you can do to ensure you have this option is to do well as a pre-med and give yourself lots of choices–but that's what you were going to do anyway, right? Of course, as you head towards applying, it may make sense to schedule phone appointments with financial aid folks; however, these questions are often answered on individual schools' websites.
Being married creates a new set of financial aid issues, which I don't understand, so I can't offer much guidance there.
–joe
jrob,
You might also consider some competitive state universities that take a good amount of out-of-state residents, these schools generally have lower costs even for out-of-state students. For example, the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas is a top ranked medical school that takes a fair amount of out-of-state applicants and offers in-state tuition to its out-of-state students. Tuitions amounts to about $8,500 a year (excluding living expenses, but Texas has a very reasonable cost of living even in the larger cities). The same goes for the Baylor College of Medicine located in Houston - although private, tuition is still about the same as all of the the Texas medical schools. The California schools such as UCSD, UCLA, and UCSF (excluding the private institutions such as Loyola, Stanford, and USC) also have low out-of-state tuition rates at about $10,000. The only draw back to these schools is that they are tough to get into from out-of-state, but not impossible (although some may argue that the UC’s are impossible to get into even for CA residents). Still, they are worth a shot because they are what many would consider “elite” schools.
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| I am actually only 21, but I am married and have 2 kids, so I think I qualify as independent. |
Nope, I'm afraid that's not how it works. Just today my class got a memo from our financial aid dean talking about the Primary Care Loan administered by HHS - he emphasized that regardless of your circumstances, the loan requires that you submit financial information, including tax returns, from your parents.
If that sounds ridiculous to you, imagine how it sounds to me at my age - you are younger than one of my kids! - but those are the rules.
At many schools, you'll be eligible for *some* forms of aid if you do not submit parental information, but will be required to give parental info in order to be considered for other forms of aid.
The Primary Care loan is one way to significantly reduce your indebtedness - you get a very low-cost loan that is deferred throughout med school and residency - interest is subsidized and does NOT accrue during those periods. You then must stay in primary care for the period of time it takes to repay the loan; if you go into another specialty, you'll have to pay back at 12% (yikes). I don't know all the details but it is definitely worth looking into.
I have read that you should only consider a military scholarship, which requires military service of several years, if you are interested in being in the military in general - i.e. don't do it just to get the Army or Navy to pay your med school expenses, because you'll have to put up with all the crap of being in the service and some people find that a high price to pay.
the National Health Service Corps is another avenue to consider. Read more about it at http://nhsc.bhpr.hrsa.gov//get_involved/sc...holarships.html
Every med school has a financial aid office and probably some version of the on-line information I'm drawing on to provide this answer. I find my school's FA stuff pretty easy to understand, and you can check it out, see if it helps:
http://www.gwumc.edu/smhs/Fin-Aid/INDEX.html
Good luck!
On applying for FA and your parents info…there are several conditions under which you are considered “legally independent”. To the best of my recollection: 1 - already possess a BS/BA, 2 - married, 3 - have children, 4 - legally emancipated among others. Independent status allows you to apply for FEDERAL loans w/o a parental signature or requiring that you submit your parents info. Again, I stress this is for FEDERAL student loans.
However, for many other loans, esp those administered through or by the school, state, communities at large and many other gift/grant awarding institutions, they WILL REQUIRE parental financial information. As such, many medical schools simply stipulate that this info is provided by anyone who attends there just to minimize confusion and to ensure that each student receives the max possible gift & loan support. My school, KCOM, did not require that I provide parental info…being as my father was a station manager for Delta Airlines & my step-father an operations manager for Target distribution centers – I was not gonna qualify for any of the hardship stuff anyhow.
Long & short of it is, you will definitely have to provide your info and you are most likely classified as an independent, definitely are if you have kids, married & so on. However, it may be in your best interest, and you may be required by your school, to submit parental info. My dad got quite a chuckle when I told him I might need it…but he was more than willing to provide it.
I neglected to address the crux of the initial post…premature senility!
As a general rule, in-state tuition at a state-funded school will represent the lowest cost of attendence. Some states are much much much cheaper than others. For example Texas – I think their schools are around $7500/year; Univ of Ark is ~$14k/year and so on.
The next higher cost of attendence (bear in mind that the info I am providing dates from when I was a med school applicant, circa 1998/99) are the private schools. They represent a huge range of cost of attendence from Mayo, where a large portion of each students' tuition is subsidized thru the Mayo Trust Fund to several of them w/ tuitions in excess of $35k/year.
Generally the highest cost of attendence is for an out-of-state student at a state-funded school. The most expensive medical school is the Univ of CO. Out of state tuition is >$60k/yr for the first 2 years and then ~$30k/yr for the last 2…for in-state people, about 1/2 of that amount.
Do some research on the cost of attendence. You will actually find that the schools you expected to be the highest, namely the Ivy League schools, actually come in below the mean private school tuition. My school, KCOM is right at the private school mean – just shy of $27k/yr…last I saw, the Ivies were in the high-teens/low-20s/year.