Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“The Debt Is Suffocating To Be Honest”: Student Loan Debt, Prospective Sensemaking, And The Social Psychology Of Precarity In An Allopathic Medical School, William Burr, Judson G. Everitt, James Johnson

Sociology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Confronted with soaring medical school costs and intensifying disparities in physician compensation by specialty, medical students are forced to make sense of medical education debt during the nascent stages of their careers in medicine. Few studies, however, have examined exactly how medical students make sense of these constraints or how this process might influence decisions about which specialty to pursue or affect doctors’ wellbeing. Leveraging qualitative data collected from current students across all four years of medical education at a Midwestern allopathic medical school, we document how medical students collectively engage in prospective sensemaking about their debt and how it …