I Paid a Total of $317.50 for my Medical Degree

More precisely I paid 264.60€. What’s that like? Well, I can’t complain.

4 min readMay 13, 2021

Did I get a shady medical degree from an online school that doesn’t even exist? Or am I a fraud like Frank Abagnale from “Catch Me If You Can”?
No and no, but don’t worry, I am not offended — it does sound too good to be true.

By now you’ve probably already guessed right. I am from one of these countries that have free university education, no strings attached. I didn’t even pay a cent of those $317.50 to the university itself. It all went towards the students’ union. Having grown up in a country with free education and having experienced said free education, would I recommend it?

100 %

And here is why:

1. The economic burden

A lot of my friends probably would have never attended university in countries where you pay obscenely high tuition fees. They might have been able to attend with the help of student loans and scholarships, but chances are, they would have opted out. I can’t imagine what it is like to pay more money towards your degree than your family home might be worth. Moreover making that decision at 18 years old.

Even if the average graduate in the US is „only“ $30,000 in debt, the average law school debt is $160,000, and the average medical school debt $201,490. Not everyone has to study medicine or law, but these are among the degrees that can radically change someone’s destiny if they weren’t born into privilege and wealth. Furthermore, law is a degree commonly held by the powerful and influential, like Michelle and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi.
John Green has made a video on how he thinks college doesn’t have to pay off financially and calculated that on average it still does. Yet I believe that the mental burden of being highly in debt at an age where you should be focused on finding yourself, traveling, and developing as a person, must be crushing.
Life becomes expensive enough once we’re all grown up.