Debt a fact of life for postgraduate students

Abstract

Every year, the AAO sends a member of the Board of Trustees to the American Dental Student Association’s annual meeting to represent the specialty of orthodontics. You might wonder why we feel the need to promote the merits of our specialty to the best and brightest future leaders as they graduate and move on in our profession. One very important reason is that a student’s decision to spend another 2 or 3 years in graduate school will generally depend on the financial consequences—commonly called student debt. New studies are beginning to show that a student’s access to educational funding and related socioeconomic status play primary roles in determining the likelihood that he or she will pursue further professional education. According to a survey by the American Dental Education Association, over 90% of students at the 51 responding dental schools received financial assistance in the form of loans, grants, scholarships, or work-study programs, with students receiving an average of $43,191 per year. Loans were the primary source of financial assistance (90%). As the price of higher education increases, reliance on financial assistance also increases, and students graduate with greater amounts of debt. The American Dental Association surveyed dental graduates in 2005 and found that 94% of the respondents had some debt after graduation from dental school in 2004—either educational debt or other debt. The average total debt for dental graduates was $200,339. The percentages of dental school graduates by region showed some minor variations. In the Mountain region, 99% of the graduates had educational debt, whereas, in New England, 77% had other debts such as home mortgages, auto loans, or consumer credit. This has become an international concern with the publication of several reports in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association. “Canadian dental students’ average debt varied between $24,000 and $26,000 per annum, depending on their year of study.” Scholars from the United Kingdom reported that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and postgraduate students had higher debts. Against a background of