to think that medical students should be funded differently than students on other courses?

[ChunkysMum]

Their course is 5-6 years long so accumulated debt is higher.

Their long hours and reduced length of Summer holidays (2-4 weeks) makes supporting themselves through extra-curricular employment difficult.

There starting wage when they qualify is actually alot lower than many other graduates (five-six years after starting their degree).

They often have to commute to different hospitals.

Atm they get a bursary to cover tuition fees in the final year only, but for a low income student, the way that this works out with a reduced student loan they end up with £1000 less to spend on food etc in the final year.

But then I know a couple of postgraduates and at least one PHD who got relatively low marks at A level (BCC and BC) who had a desire to remain in higher education and stuck in once there. I don't think a PHD/postgraduate study has ever been considered a guarantee of a high salary. Its always been more competitive to gain entry into the professional degree subjects in the first place. Some particularly difficult/specialist fields aside.

YADNBU.
You need to pay decent salaries to doctors, which is what they are paid currently (not obscenely high as some may have mentioned). You need to keep the profession attractive to bright students. These are intelligent people. If they had chosen banking, trading, property management etc they would have reached higher echelons of their trade and rewarded much mor handsomely. They shoulder great responsibilities, work very long unsociable hours, need to commute to multiple hospitals, pay for courses, exams and indemnities and professional membership from their income throughout their careers. They also pay high levels of tax back into the society. I think it's only fair to reimburse them appropriately.

Bartlett do you have any information on the grades at A level/Scottish Higher required for entry into medicine as compared to nursing/teaching?

Recent Scottish entry requirments -

Nursing, as low a CCCC at Scottish Higher (Dundee uni prospectus, last years, copy).

Medicine, 5x A all taken in one sitting, no resits allowed, entrance exams must also be taken (UKCAT, BMAT). Some med schools say AAAAB but few get in with those grades.
Places at UKmed schools have been cut by the gov very drastically in recent years, very very tough to get in. Fewer than 60% of applicants with all the right grades will get a single offer of a place.

Thanks Madsometimes, but you do realise I'm just a nurse don't you?

My DH came from a very poor background - both parents out of work, dad off with depression, several children, council house and very minimal benefits that just about fed the family. Fifteen years ago, he was entitled to a small grant to enable him to go to medical school. Despite the grant, he took on part time jobs - as care assistant, and two as a cleaner - to try and make ends meet. He was still faced with potentially leaving the course at the end of his first year due to hardship.

He made a choice then - to join the army, who then paid his costs. He remains in the medical corps, having almost served his medium term comission, but we are both desperate for him to leave. I am so grateful that the army has enabled him to become someone I consider to be a very fine doctor, but equally the number of milestones, birthdays and crises his family has had to experience without him is basically incalculable. Two weeks after DC3 is due this autumn, for instance, he leaves for Afganistan.

If getting by was hard for him fifteen years ago, and he faced such difficult choices even then, I really can't imagine how difficult it must be for medical students coming from poor backgrounds nowadays. I suspect many of them won't even bother applying - the bursary schemes are by no means adequate, particularly when the student - like my DH - has to send money home to help the rest of his family.

As an aside, I think PhDs are a very different matter. I have just come to the end of mine (fully funded by a research council, so actually much more competitive than entry to medical school) and have never expected a particularly impressive salary - as a post doc I earn about the same as when I was a secretary in London. However, academic jobs come with different but - IMO - lesser pressures and costs than a medical career presents - DH's insurance rises every year, but so do his professional membership fees and compulsory training costs. Doctors' pay is NOT as astronomical as some posters have suggested, but is IS very good. If it was not very good, I don't think DH would have put himself - and us - through everything we've experienced in order to get to this point.

That was a bit of a ramble, to be honest . I suppose my conclusion is that, whatever the fee structure, better provision needs to be put in place for students from poorer backgrounds if we really want to keep the best and brightest - and not just the richest - in medicine.

YABU. There are still plenty of people applying to med school.

ggee8- are you suggesting the brightest and best in the country are all doctors?

Adriane, was that to me re: best and brightest? That was not what I intended to imply - simply that it benefits us all if the people we put through our medical schools are intelligent and motivated, rather than simply able to afford it.

I worked 20 hours a week though med school tutoring kids at £20 per hour. This gave me a gross salary of £400 per week.
My studies did not suffer-in fact I graduated from Cambridge with distinction.
I would also like to add the vast majority of students come from wealthy backgrounds-I was the only person in my year to come from an unemployed household.

Turbo, My DS is a Med student at Ox - they are now expressly forbidden from taking term time employment due to the intensity of the course - I believe Cam has made the same ruling?

I agree that med coursers are very geared to wealthier students and they are from before you leave Y9.

Simply having a parent with the knowledge, time and petrol money to run you about helping find and getting the child to work experience would put off most working class families.

Likewise for the boy I know who wants to be a vet, he's been ferried all over the place to help with lambing, milk cows and shoe horses.

YANBU Its not as if we can do without doctors.

I've never associated phds and other postgraduate study with a higher salary and I don't think current salaries for doctors are obscene at all, I think they and nurses deserve considerably more. My neighbour is a doctor, her husband earns low wages and has suffered from bouts of depression meaning he can't work. Her wages cover food, half the rent, childcare and a few other bills, her parents help her with the rent.

To be doctors and nurses are some of the most honourable professions, we need them to be of a good standard and not solely for the wealthy. My DD1 wants to be a pathologist, this is after years of her wanting to be a doctor, she is about to start her relevant A-Levels. My DS pretty much copied her and said for ages he wants to be a doctor, he has recently done more research and said he wants to be a cardiologist. I have spent considerable time working out what the cost of all this will be. If this was 10 years ago and DH and i hadn't had the luck we've now experienced in our careers, I would be telling them its just not an option. It seems unacceptable to me that because we were poor, and from poor backgrounds ourselves I would have had to tell them no to medicine.

I think the idea that if you work for the NHS you don't pay, but you do when you do private work, so that can be reflected as a percentage of your repayments.

Then will you also apply it to vets, lawyers

I don't think it's really about what we earn later. I agree that comes into it, but surely it's the supporting yourself during the degree we're discussing.

As others have said it is difficult holding down a job when you already do 8-6 weekdays, have to study on top and do some weekends and nights. Not to mention many universities send you on away placements - most jobs aren't really keen on you being away for 5, 8, 10, 15 weeks at a time. Student loan doesn't even cover rent and you can't live on fresh air, banks are more unwilling to lend now and you can't live on fresh air.

I fully agree that having had a privilidged education I should pay some of the costs but future earnings don't mean you can afford to train now. but As a profession we already have a problem recruiting from less well off backgrounds, that's not how it should be.

I remember in final year you had your fees paid by the NHS (great of course) but this meant that you only got 50% student loan. I.e. £1800 for the year. You might have got slightly more from the NHS bursary depending on parental income. I think I got the princely sum of £120 or something. I would rather have paid back the fees once I was earning and had the money to live on. At 24 my other friends had been working since 18 or graduated at 21 and begun work. It seemed a bit ludicrous I was still a parental dependent.

After qualifying in June I had to cough up for GMC registration, indemnity fees, disclosure fees etc. Of course I was ridiculously lucky to have a job to go to, I realise not everybody does, especially now. But it was a long wait for that first pay check at the beginning of September. Literally down to my last £5 of my overdraft and the bank wouldn't lend despite my proof of job because they wanted to see the money going into my account regularly first..

This is not a woe is me tale obviously, but my point was that I'm from a relatively well off background really and it was hard. I do think it's important people are able to access medical training and that conventional student funding isn't necessarily a perfect fit.

If a medical student comes from a low income family, the fees will be 6K per year, not 9K. They should also receive at least 1k extra by way of a bursary from the uni, some offer 3k, plus maintenance loan, which should cover accommodation, plus maintenance grant so just enough to live on.

No-one should be going into medicine for the money. A student who thinks they should have gone into engineering instead, doesn't have what it takes to be an excellent doctor.

Whilst I agree that a newly qualified doctor will be massively in debt and maybe in the minority of students who will actually end up paying the whole whack back. I also think that they should be rewarded with very high salaries. Lives are in their hands, how much more responsibility could someone have.

Samandi- I totally agree. It is fine but it is not "obscene". It just makes me cross when people think that doctors earn tons. My other dsis is a city lawyer, qualified same length of time and is on six figures. And she doesn't make life or death decisions on a daily basis.

Haven't read all the replies but based on my skim-reading () I'd say YANBU as even if the overall salary makes up for it, this means only rich students can afford to apply, rather than necessarily the best students.

And whoever grouped lawyers in with those taking ages to qualify, you're wrong. It's usual undergrad degree (3 years) or postgraduate conversion (1 year full time) then a year of further study (to be a solicitor) and if you have a training contract with a City firm then they'll pay for that + a contribution to living expenses. Then two years as a trainee, during which you are salaried (quite well if you're a City lawyer, craply if you're a Legal Aid lawyer but they probably don't exist any more) and then you're done.

Is the issue not inexorably tied up with the fact that all but the most recent graduates used to not have to stump up for fees themselves? And in recent times many students got maintenance grants which they did not have to pay back?

No-one really knows whether the present system of saddling our graduates with massive debts will actually work, or whether it will effect a social change of preventing all but the rich going into the professions which require longer training. It used to be historically in this country that you if you were from a poor background but worked hard and got good exam grades, you could go into a vocational degree which would pretty much guarantee you a good salary and lifestyle, as long as you continued to work hard. I think that sort of social mobility is soon going to be a distant memory.

When I went to uni, CCCCC at Scottish Higher wouldn't have got you in for any course. So its that expansion of university education which had led to the poorer students not being funded, along with the wealthier ones. But if parents have stumped up for private schools for their kids, do you think paying them through university will really bother them?

So I guess theres less distinction of the brilliant and not so brilliant at in higher education now, but everyone has to pay for it.

I never knew a doctor earn less than me

Yabu their wages and pension package (currently) make up for it

Average UK wage by profession here. I think they're doing alright, and can probably pay their above average student loans from their above average salaries.

"With regards to this comment:
"What rubbish re starting salaries, within 5 years they are no longer junior doctors and are going for consutancy or GPs, doing three days work for 80,000-100,000. Getting another 40,000 for private work. "

*Recent Scottish entry requirments -

Nursing, as low a CCCC at Scottish Higher (Dundee uni prospectus, last years, copy).*

Very little chance you would get into Nursing with those grades, unless they have a low intake that year.Or you are a mature student (and then they would want you to do the pre-nursing course) DD2 has BBCC, and she didnt get into two local Unis, until she did an HNC in Early Education in Childcare. They gave her a conditional on passing that! Luckily she did :) So she starts in September, to do Childrens nursing.

DH is a 2 year qualified RMN, he needed his HNC to get in as well. Btw the nursing bursary sounds good but the nursing course is very intensive and (probably like doctors), very little chance to take a 2nd job. DH did throughout uni, but as a bank carer, so his availablity would depend on placements etc. It was a solid 5 days a week at Uni/placement and he was pretty much there for full days. No Uni holidays apart from a couple of weeks here and there, and that depended on having your course work being up to date.

He gets a pretty good salary...but then he doesnt work directly for the NHS...couldnt get a bloody job!

Oh and his placements could be anything up to 15-20 miles away from his home, travel costs came from bursray,nothing else paid.

Several of my compulsory placements at medical school were 103 miles away and one was 280 miles away!

Geegee, I just checked and it's CC Higher and 3 x grade 3 at SG for Bsc Nursing, AAAAB Dentistry at Dundee for next year - but more typically it's ABBB/BBCC at Higher for many courses at newer Scottish unis, with AAAB/AABB typical for the older unis.

Yes, many, many more people go to university now, there are positives and negatives that come with that - a degree is not going to give you more social mobility unless it is a degree which is actually going to lead to a job that pays enough to pay off the loans needed for 4years study. OTOH, educating people is a GOOD THING and as many people as want education should have access to it, but yes, someone needs to pay for it, as it stands, many will never earn enough to pay the loans back.

The universities themselves DO find ways of differentiating between the abilities of students - many courses and universities now have entrance exams of their own. If you were applying to Dental school now, it's likely you would have to do the hideous UKCAT (Medical students have been doing it for a few years), I think most dental schools are now using it, in addition to having top grades. It's a similar story with law schools and other competitive courses. Some unis have entrance exams for most of their prospective students.

I think the drop in uni applications, and the drop in the number of students living away from home this year shows that people are very concerned about the cost of their degree and some are choosing not to go at all, or only to apply to local universities to save money.

So my original point is totally correct. By the age of 40, most will be earning at least £80000. You quote basic, no one I knows is paid basic, they all do substantial overtime.
No shame in earning good money, just do not play the poor mouth.
The final salaries pension clearly tell their own story.

Your original point was not correct. what you said was:
"What rubbish re starting salaries, within 5 years they are no longer junior doctors and are going for consutancy or GPs, doing three days work for 80,000-100,000. Getting another 40,000 for private work. " Which is nonsense.

If you had said that by age 40 a lot of doctors will be earning £80k, that would have been fine, though remember that not everyone becomes a consultant - there are a lot of specialty doctors and staff grades who do not earn that much, and a consultant salary is conditional on passing a number of exams and completing specialist training, not just something that you get with time spent in the job or age.