You would think that after what we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing shortage of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners, we would be seeing some sort of decline in the price of these educational programs.

Fewer people going into the field would mean lower prices for those programs, right? (Supply and demand.)

Let me hypothesize why this might not be happening.

We have deeply ingrained in our culture the idea that the most important thing you can do is make a lot of money. Therefore, the best thing you can do for yourself is obtain a degree that leads to a certain type of job that pays well.

This means that, because we’ve conditioned our kids to believe that money is everything, people will continue to borrow astronomical amounts of money to attend medical school, believing that they will earn enough to cover it afterward. 

I suspect that a similar pattern is emerging with other college degrees, where individuals are borrowing six figures to earn degrees that lead to jobs paying half that or less, and this will eventually affect medical students. 

This trend is already happening with dental students. There are now a few hundred dentists in the United States who owe more than $1 million in student debt!

Tuition costs are likely to continue rising while salaries remain stagnant. Consequently, we may have doctors with $1 million in loans earning $250,000 a year (or less).

I think one solution is collective action. To make a difference, we, as a society, must unite and declare that we will not continue this way. But that’s hard to do.

The other option is to implement some form of government intervention based on the values we hold as a country.

If we believe that we need more doctors, engineers, and teachers in this country, rather than more hedge fund managers and trust-fund babies, our policies have to match that belief.

One of my professors in college—a funny little self-described country boy from the Mississippi Delta—had something of a law he preached to us:

• If you want people to start do something, subsidize it.
• If you want people to stop doing something, tax it.

It works: this very idea is how we almost created a generation of non-smokers.

All the ad campaigns in the world about the dangers of smoking didn’t make a difference. What worked was taxing cigarettes to make them so prohibitively expensive that most Gen-Zers never started smoking them to begin with.

Now, we’re “taxing” the wrong things in the form of tuition increases and poor salaries.

Right now, we’re making it incredibly expensive to become a doctor or engineer. Or we’re making other fields financially unviable to work in (e.g., teaching) by failing to pay practitioners what they’re worth.

Our tax incentives and subsidies (the “rewards” our government doles out) don’t help these people, but they damn sure help those who are less visibly beneficial to society but make vastly more money. It’s why we have so many people entering finance and so few entering teaching.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time we flipped this.