Money Talk

When Joseph called to tell us he'd gotten in, we were thrilled — the unreserved kind of thrilled I wrote about in my last post. It took less than a day for that pride to run headlong into the practical: what does this actually cost, and how are we going to make it work?

I've been on the other side of this conversation too, in a very literal sense, and it started earlier than you might expect. I was fifteen when I told my father I wanted to be completely financially independent — not because I didn't want his influence, I told him, but because I didn't want to be controlled. He took me seriously: he took me off his taxes, and though I still lived at home, every expense from that point on was mine. I worked the cafeteria, then as a vet tech and animal caregiver, then scheduling insurance physical exams, then waitressing — and by the time I started college, I'd earned enough to spend my freshman summer in Europe finishing my language requirement. This was 1979, and I'll say plainly that it was an easier thing to build then than it is now. I got a National Merit Scholarship and a Pell Grant, stayed in work-study the whole way through — research, preschool teaching, more waitressing — and paid for my own education and living expenses start to finish.

Medical school was where it got harder. In 1983 there was no financial aid for medical students, full stop. I was fortunate enough to have a future inheritance I could borrow against, so I took out a line of credit — and I still remember thinking, as I signed for what felt like an unbelievably large loan, that maybe I should have gone to a public school in Ohio instead of my first choice, Northwestern. The day I got my independent license — after the year of internship and clinical practice, after passing Part 3 of the boards — I started moonlighting. Overnight shifts, emergency coverage, community mental health center gigs, all stacked on top of a full residency, because I was determined to pay that loan down. I finally cleared it the year before my first child started college. I won't pretend it was only upside: the moonlighting built my confidence and broadened my competency as a physician more than almost anything else in my training did, but it also meant I felt compelled to earn from the moment I could, and that narrowed the choices that felt available to me for a long time. That's the honest version of "empowering" — it's real, but it isn't free.

There's no single right way through this, and I'd encourage you to actually sit down and decide, openly and as early as possible, what you're willing and able to provide — because everyone's answer is different, and there's no benefit to anyone in pretending otherwise. Some families are in a position to simply write the checks — funding settled, off the table. Others lend their student the money directly, which I think is worth considering: it lets the student be genuinely in charge of their own finances, managing draws and repayment like an adult, even though the funding source is family. And plenty of families end up looking at outside financing, which for most students at this stage means a private loan — some students qualify on their own credit, but many still bring in a parent or other sponsor as a co-signer, especially without an established credit history of their own.

Ross Vet's own financial aid materials walk through this: private lenders evaluate creditworthiness and may or may not require a co-signer depending on the applicant (https://veterinary.rossu.edu/admissions/dvm-admissions/financial-options), and the school's own 2025–2026 Academic Catalog references co-signers directly in its billing policies (https://veterinary.rossu.edu/media/12201/academiccatalog.pdf). If your student is committed to this path and the resources genuinely aren't there, it's also worth looking outward — a community, a church, an employer — for someone willing to sponsor a student who has already shown what they're made of.

I won't pretend the number itself is small — current DVM tuition runs $25,261 per semester across all ten semesters of the program, for a total of $252,610, which is a real figure worth building a real plan around, not an abstraction to worry about in the background. I don't think anyone needs me to tell them that professional school is a serious financial commitment. What I'd encourage instead is treating it as the specific, math-based decision it is: run your family's actual numbers, rather than leaning on the general assumption that it will all sort itself out once your student is practicing. It very often does — but "often" is worth turning into "for us, here's how," with real figures rather than optimism standing in for a plan.

Two things surprised me once Joseph was actually on the island, and I'd pass both along. The first is food — not the obvious tuition-and-rent math, but the day-to-day grocery budget, which is easy to underestimate. Snacks and the usual junk food are genuinely expensive in St. Kitts, and honestly better avoided anyway, so it's worth treating that as an opportunity rather than a deprivation: look for the affordable, nutritionally solid staples at the local markets — beans are a reliable one — and build meals around good proteins, healthy fats, and the fruit and vegetables that are actually plentiful there. Nuts are a smart snack option, but they're worth sending along or including in a care package rather than budgeting for locally. The second is more specific: I'd send your student off with a good quality fish oil — 3,000 mg a day is the number I've settled on, and I like Nordic Naturals — because getting enough essential fatty acids is one of those small nutritional gaps that's easy to miss until you're the one thinking about it from a few thousand miles away.

By the time your child is applying to vet school, they've usually already shown you a great deal about their motivation, their follow-through, and their ability to delay gratification — and I'd let that inform how you divide things up. There isn't much benefit in doing for a child what they've already demonstrated they can do for themselves. What I've found, more than any specific formula, is that understanding your own values and priorities is what actually makes these decisions easier. Mine has always been raising my children — full stop — and once I was honest with myself about that, a lot of the harder calls sorted themselves out.

One more thing worth knowing, because it's brand new: as of July 1 this year, the federal Grad PLUS loan program — long a major piece of how graduate and professional students financed school beyond their base federal loans — was phased out for new borrowers. Borrowing through Direct Unsubsidized Loans is now capped at $50,000 a year, $200,000 over the course of the program, and $257,500 across a lifetime of federal loans. If that changes your family's math, you're not alone, and you're not without help — Ross Vet's financial aid office has already updated its guidance for exactly this (https://veterinary.rossu.edu/admissions/dvm-admissions/financial-aid), and reaching out to them directly is a genuinely good first move rather than trying to work it out from the outside.

Some of what used to make this hard has also gotten easier — wire transfers, joint accounts, shared budgeting apps have made the actual mechanics of supporting a student out of the country pretty simple these days. Where I think parents still struggle is the instinct to just handle it, to step in because we can. It's worth resisting that instinct, at least some of the time. Paying for one's own education, even partly, can be genuinely empowering for a young adult — I know that firsthand, fifteen-year-old me and all — and it's one small way of protecting their autonomy while you're still very much in their corner. Which, if you read the letter that opened this blog, you already know is the theme running under everything I write here.

Figures accurate as of August 19, 2026 — tuition and federal loan limits change, so confirm current numbers directly with Ross Vet's financial aid office before making decisions based on them.

This reflects our own family's experience and isn't financial or legal advice — talk with a financial advisor about what's right for your family.

---

Sources

Ross Vet 2025–2026 Academic Catalog — https://veterinary.rossu.edu/media/12201/academiccatalog.pdf

Ross Vet Financial Options — https://veterinary.rossu.edu/admissions/dvm-admissions/financial-options

Ross Vet Financial Aid — https://veterinary.rossu.edu/admissions/dvm-admissions/financial-aid

Address

Sunset View Apartments

West Farm, Island of St. Kitts

Contact Us

info@sunsetviewstkitts.com

Follow us on Instagram!