[chimeracoder]

> My friends that are residents in podunk Illinois are making 65k/year. It goes very far there.

$65K/year is significantly more than the average amount that a first-year resident (intern) makes ($51K/year). Also, medicine is one field where it's often much more lucrative to work in small towns than large cities, so that's the place where the discrepancy would be expected to be the largest.

$51K/year is not a lot, though. That comes out to $980/week, and residents generally now work 80 hours/week (it used to be significantly longer - 100 or more). That comes out to $12.25/hour, which is actually less than minimum wage in many cities. And again, that's the average.

Whether or not residents are literally making less than minimum wage, though, is not really the point: the point is that residents aren't making the kind of money that would make a significant dent in their debt, so they don't really start paying off the principal on their loans until they're done with residency (and even fellowships), which is a long time for interest to compound.