Medical school is expensive, and for most future doctors, the burden of major debt may seem inevitable.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 71% of medical students in 2022 graduated with education debt, averaging more than $200,000 per student. High medical school debt forces some doctors into specialty careers driven by financial realities as opposed to professional passions, and can dissuade talented people from applying to med school in the first place.
But there are options for making medical school more affordable.
“There are lots of ways you can finance your medical education and ways to strategically pay,” says Julie Fresne, the AAMC’s senior director of student financial and career advising services.
[Read: How to Attend Medical School for Free.]
Fresne says that even though medical school is expensive, it’s a good investment, with most doctors able to earn a comfortable living while paying off their loans. In 2021, physicians in the U.S. made a median annual salary of $208,000.
In addition to loans, medical school applicants should look into institutional aid, scholarships and loan forgiveness programs when figuring out how to pay for medical school.
Med School Financial Aid
As they apply to med school, students should check out what kind of financial aid is available to them — both merit-based and need-based.
Just like undergraduate institutions, med schools offer financial aid directly to students, but the amount given and percentage of students helped varies widely. In 2019, the Weill Cornell Medical College at Cornell University began offering scholarships to cover the full cost of attendance, but only for students who qualify for need-based aid.
At Harvard Medical School, nearly 75% of the Class of 2026 received financial aid, with an average annual scholarship of $60,730. The total cost of attendance there is about $110,000.
Several professional organizations also offer scholarships, such as the American Medical Association’s Physicians of Tomorrow scholarship and the American Medical Women’s Association’s Underrepresented Students in Medicine scholarship.
[READ: 15 Medical Schools Where Graduates Leave With the Most Debt]
While a combination of grants and scholarships probably won’t pay for all expenses, med students are able to borrow up to the cost of attendance to finance their medical education through the federal direct loan program, which includes four types of student loans offered directly through the U.S. Department of Education.
And students who do require federal loans have a new benefit. Under President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education plan, those who borrow for med school will have access to a more affordable income-driven repayment plan, saving nearly $1,000 a year over what students have previously paid. Some may even qualify for $0 monthly payments.
“There is no reason under this repayment program that any borrower, barring unusual circumstances, should not be able to pay off their student loans, no matter their level of debt,” Fresne says.
Tuition-Free Med School Options
Med schools know that the high cost of tuition is a barrier for many prospective students, and while partial scholarships are helpful, a handful of med schools have gone further.
In 2008, the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, a five-year, research-intensive program at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio, became one of the first U.S. med schools to go tuition-free. Nearly 2,000 applicants each year compete for one of 32 full-scholarship positions.
In 2018, NYU Grossman School of Medicine followed suit, offering full-tuition scholarships to every current and future student. And in 2023, the school announced a $200 million gift to make NYU Long Island School of Medicine tuition-free, as well.
“Coming from Puerto Rico, free tuition was a big selling point for me,” incoming NYU Long Island medical student Diego Alvarez Vega wrote in an email. “My parents don’t have the financial resources to pay for medical school. Now, I can home in on what I most enjoy doing and not pursue a high-paying specialty to pay off student loans.”
[READ: Why There Are No Safety Schools in Medical School Admissions.]
Not every medical school in the country can afford this model. Dr. James Stoller, chair of Cleveland Clinic’s Education Institute, says the full scholarship program requires a deep financial commitment.
“We extended a significant amount of money in service of the medical school,” Stoller says. While the scholarship is funded partly through the school’s endowment, the operating revenue from the hospital largely allows students not to have to pay tuition.
There are other ways med schools help relieve the financial burden for students, including three-year, accelerated programs, which shave off a year of educational expenses. About 30 schools are members of the Consortium of Accelerated Medical Pathway Programs, including McMaster University Medical School in Ontario, Canada, Penn State University College of Medicine and the School of Medicine at University of California–Davis.
Loan Forgiveness Programs
When Dr. Emily Roben was accepted to Northwestern University in Illinois for med school, she wasn’t going to let the high cost of tuition prevent her from attending. But she knew of only one way to pay, and that was through loans. Four years of medical school amounted to $240,000 in debt.
“It’s a very expensive house that you never pay off the mortgage,” Roben says of what she owed. She knew of older doctors who were still paying off their med school loans well into retirement. Roben didn’t want to go down that route so she turned to Northwestern’s financial aid office, which pointed her to the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
PSLF will forgive the debt of physicians who make 120 qualifying payments on their educational loans while they are working full time for an eligible nonprofit or government-run entity. Coupled with income-driven repayments, PSLF can make a huge difference for borrowers’ ability to repay.
Roben says she would have needed to start paying close to $2,000 a month after graduating med school through a standard repayment program, but ended up paying less than $100 a month through her income-dependent plan while she was in residency. And though her payments increased as her income went up, they still remained under $1,000 a month.
After 10 years of making on-time payments, Roben, now a pediatric emergency medicine physician at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in Oakland, California, says, “it fully felt like I had won the lottery the day I got the notice that I had done it and my balance was zero.”
In addition to PSLF, doctors can take advantage of other loan-forgiveness programs, including the National Health Service Corps program, which provides loan repayment for doctors who work a certain amount of time in a health professional shortage area, or the Indian Health Service loan repayment program, which provides assistance to doctors in return for a two-year commitment to practice in health facilities in American Indian and Alaska Native communities.
Despite the benefits of these programs, the majority of doctors don’t take advantage of them. According to a report from the AMA Council on Medical Education, 56% of graduating medical students surveyed had no plans to pursue a loan-forgiveness program. Only 3% said they planned to pursue a federal program like the NHSC.
Roben says she hopes more med school candidates will learn about and consider loan-forgiveness programs, especially if they think the cost of training might prevent them from following their dream.
“That’s not a good enough reason not to pursue what’s right for you,” Roben says. “There are programs and people to help you get through it.”
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How to Pay for Medical School originally appeared on usnews.com
