Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/opinion/medical-school-st...

> My personal experiences highlight the magnitude of the problem. Upon graduation from medical school in 2013, I owed approximately $180,000 in student debt — what might seem an outrageously high number that is actually about $10,000 less than the average for today’s medical school graduates. I scrounged and saved during residency, living in a tiny Chinatown apartment, riding my bicycle to work every day, and sneaking expired patient sandwiches for lunch so that I could make my monthly $700 debt payment. Yet upon completing residency, the amount I owed had, to my disbelief, increased to $188,000 — all my efforts had not been enough to cover even the interest accumulating on my loans.

> I am far from alone. A mentor in residency, several years my senior and making over $200,000 per year, once revealed that she had moved back in with her mother just to get a handle on her student loans. Another colleague had a marriage proposal rejected because of his mortgage-size debt.

A $180,000 at 7% interest would require monthly payments of ~$1,200 to pay down after 30 years. Even at 3% it'd still be ~$750.

I'm really skeptical of these types of articles because they don't tell the complete story about their finances and how they're spending money. In 2013 the median rent in Chinatown was ~$600, and the average salary for a resident was $55,000. After taxes that's roughly $3k/month.

They were probably in an income based repayment plan where the payments are capped versus income, and it is very common for the balance to grow if your income is low.

But after residency, you’re looking at a salary of 200K. You’d be able to pay down your debt in a few years of frugal living.

Debt itself isn’t bad if it’s taken on as an investment.

There's consequences to frugal living, particularly in the form of people moving past the ideal window for starting a family.

It's almost as if life is a series of trade-offs.

Trade-offs that the generations before didn't have to make.

You have to make allowances for things like starting a family. Otherwise we're not going to have enough people to create the expected economic value in 20 years. That will come with economic and political consequences that no one likes, and of course, the people who earned a retirement off of such short-sighted policy will be either dead or too frail to face the consequences.

I don’t see any evidence that we’re in danger of running out of people. The world passed 8B and climbing. The US is around 342M and grew almost 25M in the last decade.

If the cost of college or students loans is reducing the population, it’s hard to be too afraid of it.

And I'm sure that we'll be able to let those people immigrate with absolutely no friction. None whatsoever.

Yeah, they say programmers get paid that too, but not where I live

Do you have data that's not anecdotal?

EDIT: Do you have data that's not anecdotal and shows that residents/doctors are struggling to pay off that debt?

Plenty. https://educationdata.org/average-medical-school-debt

> The average medical school graduate owes $250,995 in total student loan debt.

> The average medical school graduate owes 4 times as much as the average college graduate

> In 1978, the average medical school debt in the U.S. was $13,500. That’s $53,648 when adjusted for inflation.

Medical school debt seems like the least compelling example given how much doctors get paid.

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/radiologist... The median radiologist is making $459k. The bottom 10% is still making $344k. So you could finish med school, be the lowest-paid radiologist in your class, and pay off your debt in like 2 years if you wanted.

A less lucrative specialty still makes the debt no big deal. If you're making $250k as a family doctor, you're still living comfortably after making your debt payments.

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