Vet school fees - Melbourne
@onyxia99 said: Hey! I’m in Yr 12 this year, I’ve had my heart set on becoming a vet for a long time. Looking at the DVM at UniMelb, which costs 250k, while fee help only covers 150k, I’m wondering if you know how payment for it would work, if I dont get a gov. subsidised place? Would I have to cough up 100k+ after completing the bachelor of science? Haven’t been able to find much online and teachers haven’t been much help. Really worried about my chances of doing the course at that price. Cheers
I’d be worried about paying that back at that price too. It’s going to saddle you with $250k debt straight out of the gate, which is at least half the price of a house around Melbourne, when the average new graduate vet wage is around $45k per year and an experienced one is more like $70-80k. Paying off $250k would be extremely difficult without a cash gift from a wealthy benefactor. But because vet degrees are in such high demand by students, there will be someone desperate enough to pay this, whether or not it’s a good idea.
Certainly you wouldn’t be the only student who’s has to turn down a full-fee paying place and keep waiting for a Commonwealth Supported Place (CSP, the government supported ones), because the CSPs are much cheaper with the government footing a percentage of the bill, and you can then put the rest on Fee-HELP. (Fee-HELP is basically an inflation-only government loan only for higher education, which is paid out of your tax withheld. You just pay more tax until it’s paid off, for the Americans in the audience)
If you are in a full-fee position, you essentially need to make sure your semester fees are paid by the census date in each semester. That’s a day about three weeks in where everybody has to be committed to their subjects. So you’d need to be paying a chunk of that $250k every 6 months, which is a huge ask. There is little flexibility and the finance department at Unimelb can be very slow to do anything.
So you pay your semester’s fees per semester, and most people would have to take out a private loan to do that.
There’s a few details I can’t quite remember about Fee-HELP though. I’m pretty sure that $150k loan is the lifetime maximum for students in the medical fields, so if you’ve already put a science degree onto Fee-HELP you haven’t still got the total $150k you can use. And I’m not sure if full-fee students even qualify for Fee-HELP in the first place, so you may be completely on your own with that $250k.
$250k is a lot of money and will take a long time to repay. My loans were closer to $40k and it’s taken me about ten years to pay them all down, and that’s on a CSP. $250k could take your entire working career and if I had to make these decisions again, knowing what I know now, I don’t think I’d accept a full-fee place, but would rather wait the extra year and try again for a CPS.
Good luck with whatever way you decide to do.
