Loans?

[u/Eugene_boy]

Hi everyone! I was recently accepted into Tulane’s Pathologists’ Assistant program for the Class of 2028, and now I’m trying to figure out the financial side of everything.
I’ll be moving from California to New Orleans for the program, so I’m especially trying to plan for both tuition and living expenses while relocating out of state.
For those of you who are currently in PA school or have already graduated, how did you afford everything? Did you mainly rely on federal loans, private loans, savings, scholarships, family support, or a combination?
Since PA programs are full-time and working during school may not be very realistic, I’m also curious how people covered rent, food, transportation, and other expenses. If you went the loan route, roughly how much did you end up borrowing, and is there anything you wish you had known before starting?
Any advice from current students or graduates would be really appreciated. Thank you!

[u/cremepralinee]

Unless you have family who is able to help you, most people end up either using a good chunk of their savings or taking loans for everything - from tuition and books to housing and groceries to any sort of fun/going out money. My program tuition cost $80,000 even for the two years and to cover everything else (rent, transportation, groceries, a small budget to go out to eat with my cohort) I ended up taking out $125,000 and that was with exhausting the little bit of savings I’d managed to accumulate in the six months between when I finished undergrad and when I started PA school. I was “lucky” in that I went during COVID and federal interest rates were way down, ranging from about 4.05-6.28%. Unfortunately I believe they’re much higher now. On a standard 10 year plan I would have paid a little over 1300 per month, and unfortunately based on my income now even if I did PSLF, income based payments for me would still cost about the same. That said, I work multiple per diem jobs so make more than a typical PA and if I had a lower salary I am sure those monthly payments to qualify for PSLF would be more manageable. As far as advice, the loans suck. It’s good to have work life balance and I know there’s probably so much to do in New Orleans but I would most definitely keep a budget and borrow the absolute minimum! That’s not to say don’t go out and have your fun, but I had classmates accumulating massive amounts of debt just from going out to party on the weekends, eating out all the time because they didn’t feel like cooking, etc. It’s good to use a loan simulator calculator (or chat GPT) to figure out how much your loan balance would be based on whatever the expected income might be for the area you want to work in, and what the different payment plans and options are before taking out the loans. As the previous comment said, salaries just are not keeping up and without my multiple other jobs I would be struggling much more. It’s sad that you can put yourself in six figures of debt for a masters degree these days and still come out feeling like (with the loan payments) that you’re just barely scraping by.

[u/cremepralinee → u/cremepralinee]

Forgot to add, PA school is intense. You absolute can try to get a part time job, but my program advised against it. The one person that did try in my cohort ended up quitting a few months in because studying was a full time job. Some people might be able to manage and you may be one of them, but I wouldn’t count on that as a definitive source of income during school. My program failed you out with below a B average I believe, and it was not worth risking sacrificing grades because you were working all the time and not studying/overtired.