Student loan caps for medical students
Curious on the thoughts of those in the academic world in regard to the student loan caps that are set to begin in July of this year. Also hope to shed some light on the issues facing medical students. I agree the cost of higher ed in the US is out of control and student loans are a massive issue because of the ease for late teens/early adults to go over a quarter million dollars in debt (The argument of students attending astronomically priced liberal arts schools for undergraduate degrees with no career path is valid but a topic for another post), but this seems like a “solution” that is going to create or further exacerbate problems.
The new caps on federal loans heavily impact medical students and pose concerns in a time of a nationwide physician shortage. The “Big Beautiful Bill” placed a $50,000 yearly cap and $275,000 lifetime cap for professional students. Let’s take a public medical school that is considered decent but not elite and break costs down:
University of Utah Spencer Fox Eccles SOM
-Tier 2 for both Research and Primary Care (US News rankings 2026)
-$52,257 in-state tuition and fees, $94,987 out-of-state tuition and fees
If you happen to get accepted as an out of state student, there will be $44,987 left over for you to figure out how to cover.
“Go somewhere else then”
-Medical school is extremely difficult to get in to with the average school only accepting ~4% of applicants with some schools such as GWU and Yale accepting ~1%. Only 42.9% of applicants received an acceptance in the 2025 cycle. If you do get in to med school, you go wherever you can go, sometimes that means your only option is an out-of state school.
“If you can’t afford it, pick a different career path”
-okay but the same people who are so quick to say something along those lines are also the ones who complain the loudest about how long it takes to get in to see their doctor, let alone a specialist.
“But you’ll make a ton of money right out of graduation”
-Wrong. As a first year resident (PGY1), the average salary is $68,166. The ACGME restricts the amount of hours a resident can work to 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks. Say a resident hits this cap every week (not uncommon for programs such as neurosurgery, internal medicine etc.);
80 hours x 52 weeks =4160 hours a year
$68,166/4160 hours =$16.386/hour
** **You make more money per hour working at Target.
People don’t go in to medicine on a whim. It takes years of preparation and significant costs just to apply alone.
Yes, eventually salary compensation is quite high but not until someone has gone through typically 12+years of higher education and training.
Working during medical school is extremely rare with some schools even prohibiting it or placing restrictions such as limiting to 20 hours per week and only allowing employment during preclinical years (1+2 for trad. 4 year school). For those unaware, both federal and private loans accrue interest while in medical school and are capitalized upon after graduation.
There is this concept that placing a cap will require schools to lower their tuition, yet the amount of private (often predatory) third-party loan services has only increased in response. Private loans are not eligible for the Public Student Loan forgiveness plan and rarely do they have any form of loan forgiveness comparable to federal loans.
So, the question is, in what way does this cap benefit medical students? And will this impact the type and number of students who ultimately decide to go into medicine?