UMB is Maryland’s only public university focused on health, law, and human services education. Its graduates become physicians, nurses, pharmacists, lawyers, dentists, and social workers who serve communities across the state and beyond. In 2018, UMB began a project to look at how costs and funding affect student access to UMB programs for people across Maryland’s regions and income levels.
UMB partnered with HelioCampus to better understand a central question: Are UMB graduate programs financially affordable for the students who pursue them?
This work focused on connecting student debt with future earnings and repayment outcomes across different programs.
Why Affordability Matters
Graduate and professional degrees in fields like medicine, dentistry, nursing, law, and social work often require significant financial investment.
At the same time, these degrees are intended to lead to stable, higher-paying careers. This creates an important question: Can graduates realistically pay back their education costs using the earnings from their chosen field?
UMB’s goal was not only to measure tuition costs, but to understand whether graduates can realistically manage their debt based on their future earnings.
What the Study Examined
The analysis looked at approximately 1,000 UMB graduates across multiple programs, using:
- Debt at graduation
- Estimated post-graduation earnings
- Repayment patterns over time
- Differences across academic programs
- Differences by geography and cost of living