Great topic, and it's about time someone brought all this up. With your kind permission, I'd like to bring a slightly different perspective to it.
A lot of people are saying that DO schools are -- as one poster put it -- "shady, money-making operations." Wrong. DO schools are medical schools. They make doctors, and they CERTAINLY make money. MD schools are the same. They make doctors, and they also make a HELL of a lot of money. I must at this time reiterate the point initially raised by oceandoc -- in this whole argument, we are ASSUMING that the first-yr tuition pays for the first-yr expenses, second-yr for second-yr, etc, and that all of the money from 3rd and 4th year is basically pocketed since in many or all cases (I confess I don't know if this is true across ALL DO schools) DO professors in 3rd and 4th year are volunteers. This is a dangerous assumption.
We must understand that this might not be the case. It is entirely possible and even likely that money from all classes pays for the expenses of running a medical school. These expenses are NOT just the expenses incurred by the members of each class. Factor in salaries for everyone from the custodial staff to the president/dean, including secretaries, financial aid officers, assistant deans, all the profs, and so on...and we could just as easily believe that the money from the 3rd and 4th year classes goes to provide their payment/salaries. It is just as believable a possibility. Yes, I am putting it out here ONLY AS A HYPOTHETICAL, so NO, I don't believe that that is what actually happens. But the fact remains that none of us know how the money at medical schools is spent. We haven't seen the books, despite what any of us say. As I said, this was brought up by a previous poster (oceandoc, I think), and the question was, in my opinion, not sufficiently answered.
If we are going to push around the DO schools for the way they ALLEGEDLY handle their money, and if we are going to come onto this board and tell people "not to go to DO school" because they are "shady money-making operations," then please be ready to assign this scarlet letter to every higher-learning institution in this country, be it medical, law, undergrad, whatever. They are ALL in the business of making money, and we might not like the way they do it sometimes.
Example: do you know why your financial aid award check (if you receive financial aid) is held for a number of days (a policy which many administrators would say is based on nothing -- some schools call this "posting" your check) before the residual check, the money you live on, is given to you? Because the school is making money off of your money for those few days. Let's say you go to a school that (these are arbitrary numbers) charges $25000 to attend, and you are allotted $15000 a year to live on. So you get a loan for $40000 per year. Do you get your money on the DAY that the school gets it? Of course not. There is a time lag of days to months between the moment the school receives your loan money from the government or bank or whatever, and the day you get your significantly smaller check. IN THAT TIME period, your ENTIRE loan amount (the 40 grand) is put into a bank account (I doubt it's an ordinary savings, though I confess I don't know what kind), and the school POCKETS the interest off of it. After these few days, or in many cases up to several months, the school takes its tuition, gives you the rest, and off you go. But the school has made some extra money off of you. Now, it might not sound like much, but if, say, your local medical school, MD OR DO, has 100 students per class, and every student's loan money is kept in one big account for days/weeks/months, that's a lot of cash. Consider now that your local college or university has ALL of those undergrads, graduate students, medical students, law students, whatever kind of student...and you get the picture. Schools make freaking millions by this technique. Do you feel cheated?
Is it shady? Whether it's shady or not, it is 100% completely LEGAL. It happens all the time at every college in the nation. And this is just ONE example. My point: DO schools are no shadier than any other learning institution. MD schools do it. DO schools do it. Everyone does it. The fact is, until we know the exact breakdown of how money is spent at DO schools AND any other college, maybe it's best not to single out DO schools as being shady, especially with very little evidence that the initial premise that this whole discussion is based on is factual.
It also has to be considered again (it has been mentioned before) that DO schools are usually NOT affiliated with large universities/colleges, and cannot count on a lot of state money, cannot count on research grants, and cannot count on huge amounts of alumni donations. The students simply have to foot the bill for this deficit. Maybe it will change in the future.
Now, the original poster does bring up important points, like the need to monitor school spending on administration salaries. This is especially important in a comparatively young profit-making construct like osteopathic education. Indeed, when tuitions are increased by a certain percentage, but student cost-of-living allottment does NOT increase by the same percentage, students need to be asking questions.
Finally, to the people on here saying that, because of this discussion and the alleged truths revealed in it, they will NOT go to a DO school, or they are reevaluating their decision to apply to DO schools...well, you are making a career decision based on an internet message board, and on what I feel is conjecture. And I don't know of any clinical-year attending who would give you a lesser education because they aren't getting paid. Any doctor with a conscience or with any care for the future of their profession will teach you what you need to know -- and do not forget, at any level, your education is WHAT YOU MAKE IT.
Looking forward to responses.
BP
who's got my back 
