UTD [full ride] vs TAMU [$15k/year] vs Baylor [$56k/year] for Premed (biology major)

Most students who start university thinking premed end up doing something else. However, for a student who is seriously considering medical school, for the purpose of budget planning I would assume that medical school might happen and would budget accordingly. For a student who will be a university freshman next year, by the time that they get to medical school it is likely to cost well over 100,000/year, and might well cost more like 125,000/year – hopefully a bit less if he stays in state.

Given this, the only way that I would pick Baylor would be if you could handle the full cost of Baylor for four years without taking on any debt at all and still leaving enough in the bank to help a lot with the cost of medical school. For most of us this just is not going to happen.

Otherwise I would pick from among the other two options.

To me this makes a lot of sense and seems like a great choice.

I might add, we have a daughter who is on track to get her DVM in a few weeks. This is not quite the same as an MD, but the eight year path is similar, and the amount of hard work and determination that it takes to get there is similar. Given how hard it is to get to the point of earning either an MD or a DVM, I would not want finances to get in the way, and would not want to leave a newly minted MD or DVM saddled with piles and piles of debt. Your son can get there with a degree from either TAMU or UTD, and picking a relatively affordable path, or at least not-quite-so-horribly-not-affordable path, seems like a very good plan.

And I am pretty sure that TAMU has a very good medical school.

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