“The second I become a doctor, I’m defaulting on all my loans,” said Tagley Jones, credit score 682.
Photo by Amit Roth
The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) has announced that starting in the 2026–2027 medical school application cycle, the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) will now require applicants to submit a credit score along with their MCAT score, transcripts, essays, and letters of recommendation. The disclosed credit score will need to be self-reported and will also be verified by a hard credit check at the time of primary application submission. This is a similar procedure to how applicants’ grades are individually inputted directly into the application and later corroborated with their transcripts.
Following the announcement, AAMC chairman Robert Evitibihorp released a statement: “It’s a well known fact that medical school applications are expensive, and tuition even more so. Responsibility is one of the key aspects of a potential medical student, and we’ve figured that the best way to ensure that our future medical practitioners are responsible is by having an applicant’s credit score submitted along with their test scores and grades, which will help us understand who they are as a person even better. Representing a student’s worth with numbers has proven to be the best way to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within our admitted classes.”
To better prepare applicants for this new requirement, leading test preparation companies and application consulting services have announced that they will be adding financial advising to their MCAT and application prep programs. Blueprint, a popular MCAT prep service, has added personalized financial planning to their MCAT tutoring program, which has resulted in an increase of price from $3,599 to $5,499 to accommodate the change. Other consulting services such as MedSchoolCoach 1-on-1 Tutoring and Kaplan Private Tutoring have proposed plans to add similar programs for additional fees. According to Med School Insiders projections, prospective medical students should be able to report a credit score of at least 788 to be considered competitive applicants.
Though the test prep industry has been quick to adapt to this change in admissions requirements, many students have voiced their concerns for their fellow applicants from less affluent backgrounds. One such student wrote in a post on the Reddit community r/premed: “If you can’t afford an MCAT prep course you probably can’t afford financial consulting either? Though I suppose that probably makes you good at budgeting and using your resources. Boy, am I glad my parents make six figures.” Other students shared their experiences of having to take out loans to cover the cost of college tuition and how this negatively impacted their credit score, while others pointed out the high pricing of medical school applications and preparation contributing to applicants’ financial stress.
Another AAMC spokesperson, Heath Tsissalc, attempted to fight the blowback, saying, “We understand students’ frustrations with the high costs of applying to medical school. We ask students to consider that the AAMC is a nonprofit organization, but the costs of running such a large program are quite high. We have to pay our president at least $1.6 million a year and other high ranking staff at least $400,000. As we are selecting the next generation of healthcare leaders, we want to train doctors who come from the sort of background that allows them to responsibly handle this sort of money. We wish the best of luck to every applicant, and encourage them to reapply next cycle should they find the new credit score requirement a barrier to their education.”
