 This is the number that I showed on TikTok and Instagram. I'm dead. All right, so it has been quite a bit of time now. I took probably like two or three months off. Part of that was because I was lazy. Part of it was because I was burnt out, but nonetheless, we're back. What better video to make than one about student debt involving one of my fellow YouTube and physician colleagues, Rachel Southerd. And I still don't know how to pronounce her name. Southerd, Southerd. I feel like Southerd would be the right way, but nonetheless, let's get into the video. Welcome back to the channel, everybody. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael A.K.A. Dr. Cellini, and I'm a board certified diagnostic and interventional radiologist. On today's video, like I said, we're going to be going over Rachel Southerd's debt video. And I started to watch a little bit of this video, but I paused it. It's mostly like a vlog, but I haven't seen the meat of it, which is the student debt stuff. I did see her mention her student debt burden on Instagram recently, and it was a bit alarming, but I'm just gonna preface this video with that. And then a whole bunch of people tagged me and sent this video to me on Instagram. If you don't follow me on Instagram, go ahead and do that up here, Dr. Cellini. So I have no choice but to watch this video with you all and talk about it. And I'm assuming it's going to be like all of the other crazy student debt videos that I've done in the past, a huge student debt burden, and me just getting angry at the cost of medical education. Just a normal day. So let's get into it. Okay, I got this email from my school called the college cost meter. She kind of alluded to some of this on Instagram, but I'm curious to see what the whole thing is. I'm just wanting to talk about why it costs so much to go to school in the United States, not just medical school. I know that undergraduate, all that stuff, it costs so much money, but medical school, I mean, it's cost, I think, okay, the amount of loans that I have right now, 300, this is how much money I have in loans right now. I don't know if that's from med school or undergraduate. If it's undergraduate and med school loans, and that's the starting figure, it's a bit alarming. And obviously, if you've seen any of my videos, you know that I absolutely abhor the medical education costs. They're insanity. The fact that you have to spend $100,000 a year to go to med school when we're already lacking doctors in our country, it's insanity. A lot of you are asking if that's just tuition. Hold on, let's read this. Tuition plus living, be mindful of the expenses of living in Southern California rent, food, resources, school applications, sub-irritations, registered applications, blah, blah. A lot of student loans in my bank account and have not spent the entire amount that I have received. Okay, I didn't realize that she was in California. So obviously the cost of living in California is super high compared to a lot of places in the US. She probably had to take out extra loans just to survive in California on top of the exorbitant tuition costs, which I don't know what they are, but given that that is her student loan debt from med school, it's pretty high. It's not the highest I've seen, pretty darn high. No, that is tuition. I think my tuition's around a little over 60,000 and that's increased over the last four years. Every year they increase it. See, that's the crazy part too. Like I've done many other videos on this topic, $60,000 is like the average now for med school costs, especially if you're out of state student. I have seen as high as like a hundred plus thousand dollars. I have seen as low as $30,000, which is still crazy, but nonetheless, this is just the time we live in now. I don't know why, why they just, it increases, but it does, and I couldn't tell you what changes or where the money goes or what happens. I know that most schools increase their tuition every year because they can. That's my biggest problem. It's like, okay, we know there's inflation out there. Are they raising the tuition costs based on inflation, but then the cost to borrow a loans is still just as high, like it doesn't make any sense how they can just continue to raise tuition rates, not provide any other resources or claims that makes their school better, but they just charge more for it. That's like having a used car that I'm like, this is a $20,000 car, but you know what, this year it's worth $21,000 because I just think it's worth $21,000. Like what's the logic behind raising the tuition? There's no system in place that's checking on how much these schools are raising their tuition rates, and that includes college and universities. They're just raising them to raise them to make more money, and they're just allowed to do so. And I guess that's because people will always attend regardless of the cost. I don't know, it's like the supply and demand kind of thing. It's not good. Like I'm not, I wish- The other thing with that, I'm just gonna keep, you know, you know, I get excited about this stuff. Eventually, the student loans that you're able to take out are not going to cover the cost of tuition. Like there is a cap on how much government student loans you can actually take out. You can't just take out like $200,000 a year to cover tuition. What happens is you'll likely have to reach the maximum threshold that you can take out from the government, the subsidized unsubsized loans. And you may have to get extra private loans on top of your maxed out government loans to pay for this tuition in this current trajectory in which the tuition rates just keep rising without stopping. I got really upset about this and talked about it on Instagram because we honestly need to start a conversation about this because from what I've seen on the internet, I feel like I'm one of the few people who have actually shown their loan numbers and been like, hey, this is how much I'm gonna have to pay. See, this is why I like her because she's exactly right. She's real. She doesn't hide it. And this is what people need to see, especially pre-med students who are like, oh, you know, I wanna go to Yale undergrad, take out loans, Harvard for med school, take out loans, and then do, you know, an eight year research specialty, what? And then go into a lower paying specialty because that's what they enjoy. These are all things you need to talk about and consider before going into med school. As med students, at least the way I saw it, I was like, I don't care how much it costs to get into med school. I don't care how much it costs to go to med school. I wanna be a physician and that's the only thing I wanna do in my lifetime. So of course, I don't care what it takes. I don't care if it costs triple the amount that I have to pay. As long as I get to become a physician and have that knowledge and help someone else, of course I'm gonna do it. I feel the exact same way she does. And that's exactly how I felt. I didn't have anybody helping me do it through med school and I didn't care because I would have gone to med school. That was the goal of mine. That's what I enjoy doing. I love medicine, still do. Would have gone to med school again. I just kept my eye on the prize and you can't worry about all this student debt burden that's going to be sneaking up on you later on down your career. And it's so far in the future that you can't really even think about it anyways. You know, you get to the point where you're like, I just wanna go to med school. I just wanna get into any med school. I don't care how much it costs. 10 years down the road, you get hit with this fat bill and you're like, man, I should have done that differently. We all keep our heads down and be like, okay, like I'm just gonna pay this much. Yeah, tuition's increasing. You know, even though we went through a pandemic where all of the academics changed where we started teaching ourselves on zooms from prerecorded lectures or, you know, we didn't get to finish our cadaver labs or maybe all of the in-person activities that we used to do, we don't do any more. These are great points. So we're continuing to raise tuition rates year after year, but the last two years especially, everything was just remote. So you didn't even interact with the school. You didn't interact with other students in the classroom. You just watched lectures. You didn't interact with your professors. It should technically cost less for the past two years, but nope, just keeps going up because YOLO. You know, verbatim basically what I'm saying from my little rant that I had on Instagram. One might say that, hey, you're not getting your money's worth compared to what the education system used to be like before the pandemic. 100% agree with that. She's onto something. The problem is, what are we gonna do about it? Like, we're just gonna call up Harvard. I keep giving Harvard a hard time, but that's just the one I think about the most. Say you call Harvard Med School and be like, yo, your tuition is too high. And they'll be like, and? I'll be like, I just want you to know that it's high. They'll be like, so people still come here. Our education was compromised. We also couldn't go to a lot of the rotation sites that we had previously gone to because we either lost them because like pandemic rules and stuff like that. So I was actually talking about this with one of my colleagues, I think the last week, because you don't realize a lot of specialty training was cut short during COVID. You know, my last six months of training, I was doing IR, I probably skipped out on like six weeks of IR training, which didn't matter because I did a whole year of fellowship anyways. But the other side of that is new medicine residents, for example, who started residency or their internship during COVID spent the first year or two taking care of just COVID patients because that was all that was in the hospital. So you don't get the wide breadth of patients and see a wide variety of disease processes because COVID was what was occupying the hospital at that time. So you do miss out on a lot of education. We don't think about this kind of stuff. But also in that same respect, like she's talked about in med school, should you really be paying a premium when you're not getting your money's worth? This is the number that I showed on TikTok and Instagram. I'm dead. That's a large number. That hurts. I don't know what to say about that because that makes me so angry when I see a number like that. For those of you, I don't know if you can read that. It's $847,251.60 in total student loans, which I'm assuming that involves her undergrad as well as her med school. That makes me so angry. You're telling me someone who I think she wants is applying to OBGYN. So a future OBGYN has to undergo $847,000 in student loans to practice as an OBGYN. But what are we doing here? We have to dive in more of this because this is like, this is gonna make me lose sleep. That almost $900,000 number is an estimate of how much they believe I will pay by the time I finish paying off my loans. So in X amount of years from now, I will have paid almost $900,000 in loans. Oh, I see. So it's like, that's the interest rate compounded over X amount of years. She'll be repaying it. Some people are like, yeah, that's why I didn't want to go to a DO school because they're so expensive. That's not true. My school is the tuition costs like the same as an average MD school. It is like one of the more expensive DO schools, but it's, you know, a couple thousand here and there. That used to be true where DO schools were a little more expensive than some of the MD schools, but they're all expensive across the board. Unless you have some unique situation where you have in-state tuition at one of the few schools that have decreased or subsidized tuition for in-state folks, you're gonna be paying a lot of money. So it looks like her actual student loan burden is like 350, which actually sounds crazy that this is coming out of my mouth, but that's not that bad. All things considered here, $847,000, that would be over, I'm assuming like she paid the bare minimum over 30 years or whatever and that's just compounded interest. And that goes to show how interest can absolutely destroy your bank account. Let's dive in here. Let me see what the average cost or average salary rather an OBGYN makes. I think this is more right. Maybe it's like around 300,000. It's still technically, someone will probably kill me for saying this, but I think it's still technically a primary care specialty or a primary care field in a way. So I think the average is probably like 275 to 350. If I had to guess. So basically if you just get no taxes taken out and you've spent $0 in a year, you can pay it off in a year. But obviously that's not gonna happen. There's a huge meme on the internet that was like, LOL med schools raised tuition by $10,000 next year. I'm not trying to just make like a generalization and I hope that I don't get in trouble for saying this, but honestly like I have questions and concerns. Why does it cost this much to go to medical school at the end of the day? She shouldn't be worried about having this issue. I mean, I talked about this all the time on my channel and I was even going to make a video that I deleted that didn't work out where I was just going to call med schools and ask them like why their tuition was so high, but it didn't work out for a number of reasons, but we won't get into that. But yeah, these are questions that everybody should be asking here. Like what are we doing here people? So there's some people that are making money at this school. I don't know who, maybe the dean, some sort of education executive who knows. Somebody's making money and innate the med students. Where's the money going? Why does it cost so much? These are the questions that I have and I wish I had the answers to them, but I don't. But this is just something that I think we need to start talking about. You know, for her there's gonna be a couple of options. So she works for a non-profit hospital or a non-profit practice. She may have an opportunity over 10 years to get her loans forgiven at the end of those 10 years if she makes certain incremental payments based on her income. That's always an option. The problem is you lower your income expectations by working at a non-profit hospital. You have to kind of do a calculation. If you wanna work in private practice as an OBGYN and make more money on average, probably this is just allegedly, this is from my own like what I've seen in the world. Or you work in a private practice and make more and pay off those loans faster. Those are your kind of your options. That's what I kind of had to deal with when I was going through this. The good thing and the bad thing is that she only has to pay incremental payments probably like 10% or 15% of her salary during residency if she's on an income-based repayment plan. So that's not terrible, that's what I did. And the good thing is you don't make any money in residency so your payments are gonna be pretty low and they're pretty attainable, right? The other option is to do what I did after your residency in refinance your loans at a very low interest rate, which is another good option, especially if you don't go into academics or don't go into a non-profit hospital. So she's gonna have to do a lot of research. She can call me with any questions she has. You know, I love this stuff and I studied this stuff to know in before I finished med school and I think it's important for med students, especially during their fourth year in med school, to really sit down and figure out exactly how you're going to attack your student loans. You need to be thinking about this your whole residency career. And I know you have a lot to learn during residency but I'm telling you, this is like top priority because seeing that number, once you get that tending salary after putting it off for seven to 10 years and then realizing you have to pay $3,000 a month every single month after taxes which already destroys your paycheck to begin with, you don't have that much money left over compared to what you probably thought you would. Shout out to Rachel for making this video. Hopefully she'll watch this one. And yeah, let me know if you have your questions, Rachel. I'll be happy to help you. All right, so that officially concludes this video. Thanks again to Rachel for making this video and shedding some light on this whole situation because it is of utmost importance for people who are going into med school and for the ones who have to take out student loans. You have to think about this stuff, trust me. On that note, make sure you smash the like and subscribe button, follow my Instagram and take a talk if you don't already and as always, always now I'm gonna start making more videos. I'll see you all on the next one. Bye.