Docs In these specialties have the most student loan debt

Ever wonder how your medical school debt compares to that of physicians in other specialties? It turns out that there are stark differences in total student debt among the 16 most-common specialties. 

JAMA Internal Medicine published a Research Letter that shows how the specialties compare. Among 7 of the 16 most common specialties, a quarter or more of each faced student debt totals of $200,000 or more. The rest were pretty close to that figure. 

Let’s add some context to that $200,000 number. Let’s say you took out a 10-year loan for that amount. According to Nerdwallet, the federal student loan interest rate for unsubsidized graduate school loans stands between 6-7%. Let’s use the 6% figure for the purpose of this exercise and amortize these figures using a handy calculator (something you should do for your loans ASAP). That means you’d be paying north of $66,000 in interest alone over the lifetime of the loan. That $66K could buy a car, serve as a down payment for a home, or pad your emergency cash reserves.

You might be thinking, how is it possible that two doctors at the same medical school with the same specialty have differing amounts of student loan debt? There are several possible contributing factors. For one, it’s possible that some students had financial support from their families, lowering or eliminating the need to take on debt, as the JAMA study points out. Another contributing factor is the availability of scholarships. Finally, financial aid eligibility and availability, as well as ancillary costs — such as housing, textbooks, and transportation — can also affect debt totals.

Researchers did not speculate as to whether debt totals affect speciality choice.

“The causal associations among debt, specialty choice, and income are challenging to disentangle,” researchers wrote. “Conceptually, debt is likely to be less of a determinant of specialty choice than is future income.”