Orac has a discussion that might be of interest to the young ‘uns: what kind of debt is hanging around your neck after med school? I can’t even imagine getting out of school with a bank expecting me to pay off a few hundred thousand dollars.
I went to college in the late 1970s, when we still had reasonable support for college students. I was on my own — my parents still had 5 other kids at home — but I could actually get through four years of college by holding down two part-time minimum wage jobs and with a fair number of scholarships and low-interest or no-interest loans. I graduated with perhaps a few thousand dollars of debt that I paid off easily — I’d get these quarterly bills for something like $30. Since these were loans at negligible interest, I almost felt a little regret at paying it off.
Unlike Orac, I took the grad school track. They pay you to go to grad school in biology. It’s a pittance, and you get to live in cramped apartments for a few years on macaroni and cheese (mmmm…free government cheese…) and the refreshments at departmental seminars, but you don’t come out of it poorer than when you went in. You also don’t come out of it with great job prospects and the employment is all for a low salary, but that’s another issue…
Our Department was so poor that I didnt dare to abuse of coffee and cakes. But I had the School of Agriculture’s experimental fields nearby. During the late seventies, many of their trial plots yielded no produce.
My departmental aid is so low that I have been unable to survive without student loans. Having consolidated, I will actually be paying them off until I’m 70. No retirement or house for me.
My husband and I both went to a small (private) college. Then, while he was in Med school, I worked on a graduate degree in archaeology.
We married after he’d graduated, and between the two of us, we owed the GSL people over $65K. In some places, that’s a house!
Barbara Ehrenreich just published a piece on college debt in both The Nation and at the HuffPo. It’s quite an indictment of the whole system of college debt as it now stands, by the title of “Welcome to Fleece U”. She has a particularly nasty bit of venom for the textbook scam, a pet peeve of mine as well. As an historian, I tend to find the whole thing ridiculous and avoid using commercial textbooks whenever possible. On the whole, the article is a blunt assessment for those of us who work in higher ed, and we should take it very seriously indeed, coming as it does from a non-academic critic with Ehrenreich’s standing.
A bigger problem with such loans is that they often allow students to take up to a very large amount in addition to just school expenses. I’ve had some friends who took well over $10k/semester while school expenses maybe reached $3k. And interest rates are no longer negligible.. if I remember correctly, my student loan interest is higher than my car.
By the way, I went through my graduate studies at a major urban public university (i.e., a relatively inexpensive one) without a single dollar in support from my department. Nor was I alone in this; a good half of my fellow graduate students also did not receive any aid. I graduated with just shy of $20,000 in debt. The housing boom, a very fortunate house purchase while I was still in school, and a spouse with an excellent job allowed me to convert that debt into a home equity loan at a much lower interest rate, but even then it will be 2020 before it’s paid off. I’m now an adjunct professor with very little prospect in the near future for a tenure-track job, so I’m stuck in the academic salt mines, earning little and helping to fleece the next generation. Not what I’d hoped to do when I went to graduate school, though at least I do get the satisfaction of actually being able to teach.
Isn’t it interesting that some European Countries provide fully funded education for students who wish to pursue academia, or education-requiring careers?
If you do it right, they also pay you to go to grad school for engineering and the job prospects are pretty good. I should note, that despite a popular misconception around here, you are not required to be a creationist to get an engineering degree (in fact I don’t know any creationist engineers).
It’s a strange thing. We all “know” coming in that we are giving all of our twenties to graduate school, taking on debt, and losing a lot of our potentially (financially) productive years. And yet at the age of 22, it seems to make perfect sense.
Now at the age of 30, married, and looking for permanent work, it seems like a bit less of a good idea. I don’t think I’d change my decision, but it definitely means something different now.
The hardest part for me has been interacting with family and folks in “the real world” who don’t understand what grad school is about. They seem to think “student” means I’m living in a dorm waiting for the next frat party.
We tried to get a mortgage a couple of years ago based on some investments from my wife and some good budgeting from grants and stipends. She had owned a home previously and we had 25% to put down. But the banks were completely mystified at the prospect of lending to us. It seems that we have no income they recognize. We were told that making $6/hr at Starbucks looks better to them because “if you lose your job you can find another one” but the stipend from NSF could disappear at any moment and then what would we do?
grrrrr….
This is misplaced outrage, at best. No one deserves a graduate education (and possibly not even a undergraduate one). There is already a major opportunity cost for spending time in grad school, so it’s not like any of this is very new, it just shows up in the bottom line now. Furthermore, there is a wide spectrum of universities out there, some of which are guaranteed to have had money for you. You are responsible for your graduate school choice.
In any case, Congress is the only organization that can control and incentivize these sorts of costs. Do they think it is important for everyone to have an undergraduate education? Enough to enact a progressive tax to pay for it? Do they gauge that the extra cost of supporting more graduate schools is worth the payoff to the economy and social atmosphere?
There’s a reason academia is called the Ivory Tower. Part of it is because you can’t fit everyone inside.
And the best part of the Barbara Ehrenreich piece is that the ads that came with it were almost all of the “No credit rating? No problem, we got your loan right here.” variety.
If I was coming out of high school these days, I’d think seriously about a trade rather than university, unless I really felt that I was destined for life as a starving academic. The pay’s better, you get more exercise, and you’re not stuck inside buildings all day. Of course, that’s difficult to know when you’re 17. I thought I wanted an academic life then, but 4 years of university cured me. (And I still ended up sitting on my butt in front of a computer for the next 25 years.)
The hardest part for me has been interacting with family and folks in “the real world” who don’t understand what grad school is about. They seem to think “student” means I’m living in a dorm waiting for the next frat party.
Yeah, I get that kind of thing a lot.
“What are you doing for the summer? Getting a job?”
NO, I’m a PhD student, I’m doing research in the summer, just like I’m doing now in the fall and in the spring. Not only do I not have time for an outside job, I’m not allowed significant employment (in terms of hours) outside of my research by the contract I have with the university where I’m doing my PhD. I don’t know how well that’s enforced, but it does serve to underline the university’s interest in me finishing as rapidly as possible.
As for debt, I was one of the lucky folks with parental support during my undergrad. Pay rates as a graduate student (in Canada, in biology, don’t know about other places and other fields) are non-zero, true enough, but I am quite clearly below the nationally- and regionally-defined poverty line. Poverty sucks, but I don’t think simply raising graduate pay levels is either possible or necessarily desirable, because of the secondary consequences and because of the obvious question: where would the money come from?
Get rid of the athletic departments, and the sports information office and all the marketers. Stop hiring consultants to “re-brand” the university, along with the other idiocies they’re hired for. Just a couple suggestions.
I was lucky. I went to university back in the day when you got fees paid AND a grant. Wooo! Debt free learning!
I saw this crap going on as an undergrad, budget cut backs + more grad students = shittier conditions. More debt scared the hell out of me.
So I went a different route.
I’m halfway through a MS mech engr (bite it PZ), and my current private sector employer is paying the tuition. Granted the string is I can’t leave for a year after graduating, but that’s worth the $30k. And right around thesis time, my undergrad loans will be done. Booyah.
Yep, if you’re looking at ways to save money for the university, start with firing the President. Our president’s annual salary is sufficient to run two small labs. (Or to buy my house 3 times a year, with cash). It makes me feel faintly ill when they put out fundraising brochures knowing just how much the President of the U makes…
I went to college about the same time that you did. Tuition (in-state) for a full semester at the University of Illinois was $343 (yes, I still have my receipt).
Today: Approx. $6000.
And tuition in Ohio has been rising at around 8% while inflation is 3%.
Jefe @7,
practices will vary widely from country to country, but here in Europe university fees seem to be far lower than in the US, regardless of what you study.
When I was studying in Germany (more years ago than I care to think), I paid a grand total of, IIRC, about DM50 (maybe 30 US dollars?) per semester in fees. And the uni collected these fees for the student body rather than for itself. Some of the German states are now introducing tuition fees, causing widespread student outrage. But these fees are low by US standards: they seem to range between €500 to €750 per semester — from a little under $700 to a little over $1000 at current exchange rates. (My alma mater now charges about €630 per semester, including €500 in tuition fees; the rest are various other fees, including a reduced-fare ticket for public transport. The fees for the student body have gone up to €35 since my day.) A university education can be hard for students from low-income families to swing, but housing and living expenses are a bigger part of the burden than tuition fees.
Mind you, third-level education is heavily subsidised by the state in Europe. So if you’re not an EU citizen (or haven’t lived/paid taxes here for a few years), some countries’ universities that would otherwise charge only modest fees will demand the whole whack, which (depending on the course) could be much higher, possibly even in line with US levels. German universities don’t seem to draw this distinction, though.
What I see coming is a return to a Victorian-style system where the only people who will be able to afford/justify devoting their lives to science will be those who come from wealthy backgrounds. It’s been noted that the greatest thing Darwin had going for him was complete financial freedom to spend his life doing whatever he pleased. I’ve already seen the beginnings of this where I went to graduate school in the Deep South; the undergraduates coming to the summer marine biology courses in their luxury cars that mom and dad paid for, students whose parents BOUGHT THEM A HOUSE to live in while a grad student, etc.
As a response to those people who like to say “Well, you knew you wouldn’t make a lot of money when you started this career” I’d like to say that this is true. Yes, I knew I’d never be rich, but I never thought that I’d be unable to afford to buy a place to live. Where I live the average house price is over $600,000CAD, and my salary as a research associate/ROV pilot/Research Vessel skipper is $40K. My heart goes out to people who’re forced to get huge loans to devote their lives to science. I wholeheartedly believe that science at its heart is an altruistic field, but it shouldn’t be a martyrdom.
Echoing sentiments shared by others here, I don’t regret my choice to go into this career. I love my job and I realize it’s the kind of thing that people dream about doing all their lives. That doesn’t mean I’ve forfeited my right to get depressed occasionally about the fact that I can’t afford a condo or even a used car.
Student loans are terrible, and are going to hurt science. How much longer will people keep on taking huge debt loads for diminishing financial returns in a world where the cost of living keeps going up?
I did undergrad at a state college and got out loan-free, but then the Grad School Entity (sort of like the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek:NG) showed up in my life. It’s first move was to put me *back* in undergraduate classes to allow me to get accepted to the type of grad program I wanted. While doing that, I delivered pizzas and telemarketed and accrued a few thou in debt.
Then, once in grad school, I was in stipend land for quite a few years, not able to save much at all. And time was passing. Now it has dumped me out in my mid 30s with a few years college teaching experience but really no positioning for a job (since no postdoc). If one does this route, particularly if it is a science PhD, it really leaves you sort of high and dry. In my case it is not the debt that is the issue, it is the ill-preparation for further earnings. Earnings can dominate debt if they are strong, but academic science tends to totalize: either you get a pretty good teaching position or you get nothing, and then the “real world” doesn’t know what to do with you. A science Ph.D. sounds impressive, but how is going to further a company’s interests? And do you really want to sell pharmaceuticals?
Etc.
In some ways, grad school is a great way to socially and financially sideline some of the smartest most dedicated people in our society right when they need to be engaged (their mid 20s to mid 30s) and building into a career arc.
The thing that bugs me about loans are that the providers, even respected banks, are always trying to do something shady. The interest rate is lower but there’s a large fee to take it out, for example. They also had two accounts for me for some reason, only known to them, the only difference being that the account number for the second had a -1 at the end. I paid one of them, thinking that that was it, and they started threatening me. I decided that that was the last straw so I took out a $5000 advance on my credit card and paid off the balance that was on the statements. Apparently interest accrues daily so I didn’t send enough! I called and they had some sort of story about this so the next month I ended up sending $100 over what the statement said and let them send me a refund, which I nagged them about. IMO they owed *me* daily interest! ;^)
This is another reason why we should all have been autodidacts like DaveScot. It’s a whole lot cheaper.
My undergrad college years finances sound very similar. Attended UCSD in the late 70s early 80s. College was definitely more affordable and I only had $2000 in loans. In addition, at least at the University of California, tuition and student fees included complete health insurance coverage — imagine that! I worked my through, but was really fortunate: first, landing a teaching assistant position on campus and later a internship at SIO. Yeah, it was very unusual being an undergrad TA– I was the only one in the department and worked with two grad students for the same course. It gave me some great benefits: my own office, 24 hour access to the labs (allowing me to get my own course work done as needed), and a faculty parking permit (made it much easier to get a parking space especially when running late for classes.
I did take out a student loan, which I used to purchase my first car, a used ’67 Cougar beach comber, because $1000 for a car was not in my budget and taking a metro bus doesn’t work too well when you are on campus past midnight.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones.
I went to a small, inner-city state school in Ohio- one of the few that didn’t gap me for financial aid. What I didn’t earn in scholarships that I worked my tail off for in high school, my parents paid out of the savings account that they had planned for me when I was born. During that time, I found some undergrad research assistant jobs that helped soften the blow as well. I graduated with my BS in Geology debt-free, and went on to grad school. I’m at the tail end of my MS (writing this instead of making revisions), and since I got a good TA package, I am still (with the exception of <$200 credit card debt incurred by a poorly done brake job) debt free.
If you think having 250K in loans coming out of med school is bad, think about this. I teach at an art and design school where the students often walk out with 100k in student loans…for an art degree. Now I love being a designerr and artist, but it’s not exactly the steadiest or highest paying job in the world. I worry for these kids.
By the way, that 250K is for undergraduate, tack on another 60K for grad school.
Davidson College in NC (where my bro-in-law heads up the neuroscience dept), which sends a majority of its students on to med/law/graduate school, has just done away with loans all together in order to liberate their students from at least the undergraduate portion of their eventual loan load. Students who cannot afford the tuition outright are given a package of scholarships and work/study jobs to cover their nut. Princeton did this a few years ago, too.
A number of recent h.s. graduates I know have chosen to go to state schools rather than Johns Hopkins/Stanford/etc because they are aiming at law/med/grad school and are terrified of their eventual debt.
It’s surprising how many people who want an advanced degree but fear being able to pay for it end up in law school. At a top-tier school you’re going to go $100k+ in the hole, but at least you can get out and make serious $$ to pay it off. As a financial investment, it’s a good deal. But of course, then you’re a lawyer…
I’m a student at UW-Milwaukee, and right now I’m on track to have 20-22,000 dollars of debt to pay off when I graduate. That’s if I’m remembering correctly. Most days I do my best not to remember.
My cousin Steve, however, was a different situation. I don’t know how far he’s come in paying off his debt, but he is a pediatric surgeon. When he got all done with school and medical school, I know he had over 100,000 dollars of debt, if not 120,000.
Or you can just skip college all together. I work in an industry (IT) which doesn’t require a degree. Now in my mid-30s I am taking classes at the UofM and just taking what interests me. Which annoys my “adviser” who insists I “have a plan.” I didn’t have a plan when I graduated high school and I’m not starting now.
You can’t win the game with government cheese.
I’ve been seriously looking into doing my Ph.D. in New Zealand just because foreign students get charged the same tuition as NZ citizens, and the tuition is a few thousand per year. If I fail to get into a US program fully funded, I’d be paying way more per semester than I’d pay in NZ for the entire academic year!
Mac ‘n cheese? Reallies? So old fashioned. Now, Costco ramen, that’s the stuff!
That is terrifying. I took a few years off and am just now starting my undergrad. I’ve been planning on going into science since I was a small child, but some of the posts here on scienceblogs are starting to scare me off. I’m going to my local urban state university (which by todays standards is dirt cheap) and am still going to finish my BS many thousands of dollars in debt despite the fact that I’m working full time while going to school.
I’ve still got a few years left to make up my mind, but if I end up deciding to forgo grad school because of expense and poor employment opportunities I will be heartbroken.
My son is attending UC Santa Cruz With tuition, room and board running $50,000 a year as an undergrad. My wife and I earn a nice income from owning a business we’ve worked hard to establish and run. I pay over six figures a year in just Fed. TAXES in addition to paying about 1/2 of my sons tuition per year leaving 1/2 on PLUS loans that are already in repayment. What happened to a free public education at state run institutions? Fact of the matter is, bankers are raping us everywhere we turn WITH THE HELP OF OUR FEEBLE GOVERNMENT. We are being looted! Peaceful revolution anyone?
And tuition in Ohio has been rising at around 8% while inflation is 3%.
Look to your state legislature to help explain that. In the past, most of the costs of college tuition were taken care of by allocations from the state, hence “public state university”. States have been cutting and cutting their allocations, to the point that in some places the state portion has been cut from about 70% of operating costs down to 20%. That shortfall has to be made up somewhere. More aggressive fundraising and grant-earning can only do so much, therefore higher tuition.
The effect is that it’s basically turning every school into a private school in terms of who pays for what, but the state is still holding on to the power of micromanaging the school without paying for anything. Bad situation all around.
They don’t teach you how to teach in grad school, and they don’t prepare you for the debt, underemployment, rotten academic salaries, or worse, joblessness. I hear that college sports players (and even professional players) get financial and career counseling to help them cope, given the small likelihood, for most of them, of living off the activities that have absorbed their lives for so long. Grad students like to think they’re much smarter than sports players; but maybe this is the kind of service they need as well. Of course, no-one in the university would actually pay for it…
This discussion – both on Orac’s blog and here – struck a chord with me – I started my undergrad at the end of the 1980s, and for my first two years, I had Pell Grants (remember those?), as my family wasn’t well off. $500 per semester at the local state university branch covered 12-15 hours of tuition each term, and my books were never much over $200, so my part-time / full-time job covered me. Costs were rising steadily as I shambled towards a BA degree, so that by the end I did have $4000 in loans. My wife was a much better student (and a harder worker), and had a full ride at Drake where she double-majored in biology and philosophy, all on the University’s dime, except for the jobs that she held down to pay room, board, and the like – she graduated not owing a brass farthing. I’m frankly gobsmacked at learning how much people pay now, and can’t imagine what it’s going to be like in a dozen years when our children are considering it. Why, why, why is it that we allow this? You shouldn’t live in fear of near-eternal debt just because you need an education (or, dare I say, *want* an education), any more than you should have to live in fear of getting ill and needing medical attention in the United States. This has to stop, and the time that it has to stop is now.
Clare is dead on in the lack of preparation grad schools give their students regarding any career outside the hallowed halls of academe. My doctoral advisor, as well as the rest of the faculty, assumed all his students wanted to be just like him–tenured faculty at a major university–while ignoring the reality there was a finite supply of those jobs to go around. You want to see long odds for a tenured teaching job? Get a degree in interdisciplinary social sciences, like Science & Technology Studies, and then prepare to wallpaper a large house with FOADs. Multiple publications, presentations, and research awards won’t help much if the hiring committees can’t figure out just which disciplinary pigeonhole (philosophy? sociology?) you fit neatly into. It took several years of being adjunct slave labor before I figured out the federal government will hire almost anyone who can demonstrate basic literacy and is willing to put up with bureaucratic b.s.—and the starting pay is better than what most humanities and/or social sciences programs are willing to cough up for junior faculty.
And, yes, I also anticipate making student loan payments for at least another ten years. My own fault — it would have been possible to get through grad school debt-free (I had friends who did it) — but I gave in to the temptation of easy credit to pay for educational necessities such as food tastier than Ramen noodles and transportation more convenient than the bus.
I’ve still got a few years left to make up my mind, but if I end up deciding to forgo grad school because of expense and poor employment opportunities I will be heartbroken.
Jon, do look into this. I and many others I knew entered grad school with unrealistic ideas, both about what grad school itself would be like and what life after grad school would be like. You mentioned science. I did a Ph.D. in science and if I had it to do over again I am not at all sure I would have. Without exagerration, it took over the period of my life from age 22 to 33 (in that there were years of preparing to get into grad school in my case, and then 6.5 years for the Ph.D.), and has continued to reverberate with me now at age 36 and beyond, as it has left me with a void of work experience on my resume. Plus pretty much from year 3 through the end it was a depressing painful slog of crap experiments, fluorescent lights, blood, and a gross breakroom.
There were certainly some good things about the Ph.D. program, too, so it is a mixed bag. However, sometimes I think there is an alternate universe out there in which I started building an alternate career in something other than science (in my case, something creative), and by now may have had a better positioning in life/career.
Don’t think you will be “heartbroken”–you really don’t know that now. It might be for you, it might not be, but there is nothing that says you have to go to grad school just because you like science. Seriously. It’s a big world, and there are lots of possibilities.
My average Doctor (MD) client makes over $250,000 per year and, frankly, works about 35 hours a week, max. The surgeons push $500K even if they’re not members of the “old boys network.” Those that are, push a million.
So, I’m not impressed with whining about a $55K medical school debt. Or a $100K medical school debt. Or whining about $50K insurance policies (which are paid by the practice anyway).
In fact, I just finished up an OB/GYN’s tax return last week. She made $276K. She has a big expensive house ($30+K mortgage interest) and gives about $30K a year to charity. Her total taxes were 46k. That left about $170,000 to live on… If you can’t live on that money, cry me a river.
Now, with that said, I agree there’s a lot of bull-shit that comes to education. A lot of fleecing which includes text-book publishers churning the revisions to obsolete texts, the BS fees you pay, the tuition costs that sky-rocket. All hidden behind “free market is God” bullshit.
I also think we need a massive increase in public funding of public universities to increase access to educational opportunities, much like they do in other, more progressive, countries.
But crying about medical school debt… I’m sorry, if you make it through and have anything going for you, you can pay it off in just a few years once you get past residency.
Well, if you’re dead and you’re rich, your children no longer pay taxes on your vast accumulated wealth. I think that’s a pretty even trade for getting to crush the serfs under massive amounts of debt, even if there aren’t any debtor’s prisons.
I’d like to offer this as food for thought. Most of my friends who’ve been to medical school have chosen specialization precisely for the financial benefits it gives. They want to pay off their loans quickly, so they become specialists. This is admirable, except this country (Canada) is currently suffering a major shortage of general practice doctors. So, high debts in medical school, even if they can be paid o ff quickly, hurt us all.
Also, bear in mind that medical school entrance (at least here in Canada) requires at least a bachelor’s degree. However, it is so competitive that many of my friends who chose medicine as a career first got a masters degree so improve their chances at acceptance. So, they’re already 25 or so when they enter the field. This means that most will be in their mid-30s by the time they finish residency, or even later if they specialize. Even making that kind of money, the lost earning potential for things like retirement is enormous, and compounded by having to pay off student loans. Any banker planning your retirement savings will tell you it’s better to have small amounts invested early than large amounts invested later.
I had a paleontology prof who used to be particularly nasty. Not only did we have to buy the ($130!) textbook to be able to complete assignments, but we were expected to buy the ($60) workbook the professor wrote himself (which is where all the assignment questions came from).
According to the print shop, the professor made $30/book. At 200 students a semester, that’s a nice lil’ chunk of change going right into his pocket…
Yes. That’s precisely what Austria’s government did in 1975 after the Socialists took it over in 1970/71.
Except for “payoff to the economy”. It’s an investment.
And what payoff to what social atmosphere? Do you mean the taxes?
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Of course the right-right coalition government that came to power in 2000 couldn’t watch that. It reintroduced tuition — as a tax that went into the federal budget hole. Outrageous? Yes, but not in comparison to anything in the USA, as far as I’m aware. We’re talking about 363.36 € per semester*, and if you aren’t rich, you get that back in the same semester. The subsidies for non-rich students were not abolished.
* Twice that for non-EU-citizens… and they aren’t allowed to work. But that’s another topic.
The tuition no longer goes into the budget hole. Well, not directly. Instead, it goes to the universities, and similar sums are cut from the university budget every year. That’s another difference between the USA and the European welfare state: in the USA, the schools get things like the No Child’s Behind Left Act, but the universities… the big and famous universities anyway swim in cash and pop out one Nobel winner after the other. Over here, the schools are funded, but the universities are by and large poor.
———————–
If you find a job, mwahr hahr.
I don’t know how it is in the USA… in Austria there are way more medicine graduates than needed, and too few doctors because the doctors’ cartel (Ärztekammer, “Chamber of Physicians”, as in “Chamber of Commerce”) prevents competition.
Yes. That’s precisely what Austria’s government did in 1975 after the Socialists took it over in 1970/71.
Except for “payoff to the economy”. It’s an investment.
And what payoff to what social atmosphere? Do you mean the taxes?
————–
Of course the right-right coalition government that came to power in 2000 couldn’t watch that. It reintroduced tuition — as a tax that went into the federal budget hole. Outrageous? Yes, but not in comparison to anything in the USA, as far as I’m aware. We’re talking about 363.36 € per semester*, and if you aren’t rich, you get that back in the same semester. The subsidies for non-rich students were not abolished.
* Twice that for non-EU-citizens… and they aren’t allowed to work. But that’s another topic.
The tuition no longer goes into the budget hole. Well, not directly. Instead, it goes to the universities, and similar sums are cut from the university budget every year. That’s another difference between the USA and the European welfare state: in the USA, the schools get things like the No Child’s Behind Left Act, but the universities… the big and famous universities anyway swim in cash and pop out one Nobel winner after the other. Over here, the schools are funded, but the universities are by and large poor.
———————–
If you find a job, mwahr hahr.
I don’t know how it is in the USA… in Austria there are way more medicine graduates than needed, and too few doctors because the doctors’ cartel (Ärztekammer, “Chamber of Physicians”, as in “Chamber of Commerce”) prevents competition.
Same for law school… Sure, you can make a lot of money as a lawyer. If you don’t live in a small town. And if you don’t take on charity cases. And if you don’t become a public defender. All of the social service arena jobs where lawyers could actually help people have such small salaries that even people who want to take them can’t because of the law school debt they’re in.
Moses wrote: In fact, I just finished up an OB/GYN’s tax return last week. She made $276K. She has a big expensive house ($30+K mortgage interest) and gives about $30K a year to charity. Her total taxes were 46k. That left about $170,000 to live on… If you can’t live on that money, cry me a river.
Moses, if you had your own blog where all your posts were just like this, I’d be hooked. You could call it Tax Returns Revealed! and dogdamn would it be good.
The accurate answer is, of course:
“As a PhD student, I already have a full-time job, but yes, I will be getting another one, for a total of two full-time jobs, for the summer.”
When I went to private school in 1972 the cost was $6500 per year. I worked my butt off during summers, got several scholarships, and had to take out a 3% loan.
Flash forward to today and my college attending daughter…
It costs $17K per year and we put $42K in to a 529 for her. Her grandfather passed away and left her $100K so she is set. If she had to take out loans I really don’t think she’d go to college. She has seen what debt can do and it scares the crap out of her.
I spoke recently with my husband’s surgeon and he said when he went to med school it was running 5 people for each slot, now it is down to 1.5 people per slot in med school. For those Canadians who can’t get in up there, come on down here and try an American medical school. At the rate we are going, we will be like those third world med school!
My wife and I met each other at a private graduate school. We were both starting our doctorate programs in psychology. Neither of us come from money and neither of us had any grants or stipends. See where this is going? I finished with $120k in loan debt (undergrad and grad), and my wife has about $80k. I consolidated into a 30 year payment plan at $580/month (my debt only). Luckily, we’re both doing very well, so we can make the payments comfortably, but if we weren’t as lucky financially as we are, we’d be living in a cardboard box (which cost about $150k in So Cal).