• By Daniel Barron on

It’s four o’clock on a roasting Wednesday last a resident physician at Yale University, and I am sitting beside my wife, Kristin Budde, who just became an attending physician, also at Yale. We are both opposite our new accountant.

Our accountant has no confidence in loan forgiveness programs

We have never spoken to an accountant; we’re not from families that have accountants. And 300,000 is an unfathomable amount of dollars. Wide-eyed and disillusioned, we hang on our accountant’s every word and encouragement; it’s the way I’ve seen my patients look as I explain diagnosis and treatment.

Around 5:30, we leave with the clear directive to pay off our student debt ASAP. Knock down these loans as fast as possible, he stated with clinical coolness. If we pay off our loans in 10 years, we might be in a good position to, one day, have financial security.

Neither of us questions whether going to medical school was a good investment. Our question is more basic, a more direct extension of the budgetary quandary we’re in now: what did we actually pay for?

You know, I heard tuition doesn’t even pay for education but that it goes into some kind of slush fund. I declare, as my fingers curl tightly around the steering wheel, which is sticky with heat. The AC hasn’t kicked in yet.

Jealous, she says. I thought I was getting a good deal. She went to medical school in Texas, where tuition is among the lowest in the country.

I mention that Robert Grossman, the dean and CEO of NYU Langone Health, spent over a decade building a $650 million endowment to replace tution. Continue reading “Why Doctors Are Drowning in Medical School Debt”