The Financial Reality of College
I want to start this post by saying I would never recommend doing something or not doing something solely based on the money; however if you’re thinking about pursuing more education it is important the you take into account how much it is going to cost you and what you’re going to get out of it in the end (what your potential salary will be). If your schooling is going to cost you $100,000 and you’re going to end up with a salary of $40,000 it’s going to take a long time to pay off those loans. It is often hard to think long term, and what those student loans are going to mean for you after you’re out of school but it should be carefully considered before starting and it is best to crunch the numbers before you ever apply to a program.
How Much Does Physician Assistant School Cost?
The best way to find what the cost of PA school is going to be is to look at the school you’re most interested in and see what they estimate the cost to be. They can all give you the cost of attendance so if you know which PA schools you might want to apply to you can typically look at their websites and see how much they estimate its going to cost. Tuition alone for most private schools it is just under $100,000, of course this does not include cost of living and other fees that are associated with the programs. Here are a couple of examples of the cost of attendance, one east coast PA school and one west coast PA school:
https://cfm.duke.edu/duke-physician-assistant-program/admissions/tuition-and-fees
http://alliedhealth.llu.edu/sites/alliedhealth.llu.edu/files/docs/pa-costs-16-17.pdf
Of course there are a lot of factors to look at in choosing a PA program and cost is just one of those, other things to consider include; location, class size, faculty, in-state, out of state, length of program, etc.
How Much Will You Make After Finishing Physician Assistant School?
Once you know how much it is going to cost to complete your selected Physician Assistant program you will want to look at how much you’re going to be making once you finish PA school. According to http://www1.salary.com/Physician-Assistant-Medical-Salary.html the median Physician Assistant salary for 2016 is $99,524. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291071.htm has the median salary for 2016 slightly higher at around $102,000. Of course you’re not going to be taking all that money home with you as you have deductions for taxes, medical, insurance, etc. You then have to pay all your monthly bills and other costs of living. The best way to figure out the cost of “life” is it to create a budget or look at your current spending. You can use tax calculators to estimate how much you will pay in taxes based on the state that you live in. After you take all that into account you can see how much you’re able to put towards your student loans on an annual basis and how long it will take to pay off those loans, then you will be able to determine if it is financially worth it for you to pursue further education. Of course there are a lot of options for repayment that can help ease the burden of paying off these loans and we will explore some of these options in a future post.
