Do you have the academic record to get into a good college? You'll graduate by 29. Maintain good enough grades in a relevant natural science curriculum to get into a good medical school? You'll graduate that by 33. Three years of anesthesiology residency has you completing that by 36. The median salary is $425k[0] - how many first-year programmers make the median salary right off the bat?
Since you mentioned ROI, let's look at the financial aspect. You'll need loans for college and medical school. Let's say college is $75k for 4 years all in, including living expenses, and $160k for medical school. For your residency, you'll be making barely $50k a year, likely in an urban environment. It's not unreasonable to expect additional loans on top of that just to survive, in addition to three years of interest on top of the ~$235k in student loans you already have. Is $350k in student loans unreasonable by the time you can actually start paying them off? Probably not.
Some napkin math on $350k at 5% (it will absolutely be higher because you'll need private loans) shows that you'll have a $2300/mo student loan payment for 20 years, until you're 56. If you more than double your payments to $6k/mo it will still take you 6-7 years to pay off the balance (with the benefit of saving you over $150k in interest).
A lot of people spend more than that on their house, and I'm sure $2300 is not a lot of money when you're pulling in $650k a year as an anesthesiologist with 15 years of experience. But to me there is a ton of risk in doing something like that that you may hate.
And let's not forget, you don't even have a college degree. You might find out that you just suck at chemistry. :)
Since you mentioned ROI, let's look at the financial aspect. You'll need loans for college and medical school. Let's say college is $75k for 4 years all in, including living expenses, and $160k for medical school. For your residency, you'll be making barely $50k a year, likely in an urban environment. It's not unreasonable to expect additional loans on top of that just to survive, in addition to three years of interest on top of the ~$235k in student loans you already have. Is $350k in student loans unreasonable by the time you can actually start paying them off? Probably not.
Some napkin math on $350k at 5% (it will absolutely be higher because you'll need private loans) shows that you'll have a $2300/mo student loan payment for 20 years, until you're 56. If you more than double your payments to $6k/mo it will still take you 6-7 years to pay off the balance (with the benefit of saving you over $150k in interest).
A lot of people spend more than that on their house, and I'm sure $2300 is not a lot of money when you're pulling in $650k a year as an anesthesiologist with 15 years of experience. But to me there is a ton of risk in doing something like that that you may hate.
And let's not forget, you don't even have a college degree. You might find out that you just suck at chemistry. :)
[0] https://residency.wustl.edu/CHOOSING/SPECDESC/Pages/Anesthes...