That's just tuition, they add a bunch of fees for processing to that which is another $5 to $6K per term, plus not to mention room and board, everything is mostly imported to these islands so the prices are double to to triple of what things cost in the US. Rent is anywhere from $600 to $1,000 a month and if you're renting you'll be paying for the full year even though you won't be there for a few months out of the year because of summer and winter breaks. Electricity and internet are also a lot more expensive on the islands, if you like to stay cool and use your AC then you'll be paying around $150 per month just for electricity, another $100 a month for DSL that's a decent speed so that you can use skype and download movies. Then flying home and back to school every semester can get expensive as well. Add all of that up and your yearly totally quickly becomes close to $50K a year which is what I said or around $200K plus ad whatever loans you have from undergrad which is about $50K to $100K for most and you get your $300K of debt like i mentioned. Remember the carib islands are 3rd world countries, a lot of the things you take for granted here in the US will be a luxury which people will expect you to pay extra for.
US med schools don't cost $100K a year, are you kidding.
http://www.medicalschooladmission.com/nyu-school-of-medicine/
NYU medical school costs $28K a semester, that's the same as SGU, ROSS, and AUC, But 50% of NYU students get a grant or a scholarship which they don't have to pay back. A lot of the schools also have government funds with low interest rates, or cheaper tuition for in state residents. Most carib schools especially AUA only has private loans with interest rates of 18% or more and claim to have scholarships but only offer it to one person per year.
As for matching into a residency from a carib school compared to a US school there's no comparison. the 70% match rate is for SGU only. But still 30% don't match, each SGU class is around 450 people that's a graduating class of close to 900 (some fail out, some drop out, some transfer out), 30% of 900 is 270 students and a lot of times it's not that the students with the lowest grades and scores don't match. I know a lot SGU grads with good grads and board scores who couldn't match, they were simply not lucky enough.
if you look at other schools their match rate is well bellow 50%. The NRMP puts out a match outcome every year or so and shows how many people from different types of schools matched into a residency, they look at US seniors vs everyone else (DO's, IMGs and FMGs). And when looking at the percent of non-US seniors that match you'll see that it's around 50%, and that's for all residencies even peds, and FM. Do you really want to pay $200K and have a 50% chance of getting a residency (any residency)?
And what if you do a rotation in some specialty and fall in love with it, or worse yet you do a rotation in family medicine and end up hating it, but it's the only residency you can match into, then you'll be stuck at doing a residency in a field that you hate, and working your whole life in a job that you hate simply because you need a good job to pay off your debt which is accumulating at an 18% or more interest rate.
Residency programs give priority to US medical school grads first and whatever is left over goes to the carib students and everyone else. You gotta be smoking some really strong drugs to think that you have just as a good of a chance of getting a residency, any residency if you go to a carib school especially a school like AUA as compared to any US school. AUA isn't even an approved medical school in a lot of states, when you graduate from most carib schools you won't be able to practice in a lot of states because most of those schools aren't approved. And what then? what if one of those states is your home state, or a state where your husband/wife has a really good job offer but you can't move there because you won't be able to work as a doctor in that state, what then? you get a divorce? you tell your husband/wife you can't take that job? or you simply don't work as a physician?
The only med schools that you can practice in all 50 states after graduation are SGU, AUC, ROSS, and SABA, that's it. No one else, if people tell you otherwise they're either lying to you because they want your money or are miss informed themselves like you are.
As for surgery being easy to get? It's not, I would say general surgery is harder to get than EM, Anesthesia and maybe a little easier than radiology. Most of the matches into general surgery you see are only for the intern year (your first year of residency) and don't lead to any sort of certification or further training. Those spots are extremely easy to get because you're basically treated like a slave that year and do all the scut work. If you look at SGU's match list and you look at one class you'll see that maybe 50 or 60 people of the class matched into general surgery when looking at the PGY-1 year but then you flip to the pgy-2 year and you notice that only maybe 20 of those matches are actually for categorical surgery spots and not prelim spots.
How do I know all this? because I went to SGU, graduated from SGU and now I am a 2nd year Anesthesia resident at a university program in the mid-west.
I had to have USMLE scores that were 1 standard deviation above the average to get into residency and so did most of the people that match from SGU. The only reason we match is because our grades and scores are so much higher than our US counterparts, we work so much harder and that's how we're able to secure residencies at crappy, bottom of the barrel residency programs (for the most part). If I was a US grad with my grades, and step scores, I would be at a much better residency program than I am now.
There are articles out there that show SGU as having the highest USMLE pass rates in the carib. They compared SGU to other schools, The USMLE pass rates of other schools like AUA is around 60% that means 40% of the class will fail the USMLE, once you fail the USMLE your chance of matching into any residency drops by a very significant margin.
You're only a pre-med, a lot of the people giving you advice on these forums have gone to carib schools and graduated from them.
If you don't believe what I am saying to you go to
www.valuemd.com talk to the current students in those carib schools, they'll tell you the same exact thing.
Yes a lot of people match coming from the big 4 carib schools, but what the schools don't tell you is how many start medical school and how many end up matching or even how many graduate.
SGU, ROSS, and AUC have graduating classes of about 1,000 students every year, but only list 500-600 matching residencies per year on their websites. that means around 300 to 500 students don't match per year. For US schools if more than 10 students don't match then that was a bad year for the school.
Really, there's no comparison between carib schools and US schools. Most of those attending carib schools right now would easily pay double if they had the chance of going to a US med school. They would even start all over and many who transfer have to repeat a year of med school.
So get your facts straight because this is your future and it's a lot of money. It would really suck to waste it and then find out you can't get a residency and can't get a well paying job to pay off your loans, and that does happen to some people every year.
