NUNM: the graduate school with the worst debt-to-income ratio in the country

Out of over 6,300 graduate programs studied nationwide, National University of Natural Medicine (NUNM) ranked dead last for debt-to-income ratio. Their graduates carry some of the highest debt loads and report some of the lowest incomes of any grad school program in the U.S.

The absolute worst.

You can check this by downloading that excel chart for program level data and then sorting it by the debt-to-income column. You'll see who ends up on top.

This isn’t just an acupuncture problem, it’s a graduate education crisis, and NUNM stands as the single worst example in the entire country.

The core issue isn’t even the quality of education itself, it’s the price.
It doesn’t matter how good a program is if the cost to attend is so high that the graduates will never earn enough to reasonably pay it off. This is exactly what debt-to-earnings data was meant to highlight. Because a school that routinely leaves its graduates financially underwater is, by definition, predatory.

If a school can’t show:

  • Clear evidence that tuition is affordable based on real acupuncture incomes
  • Transparency about graduate debt loads, default rates, and actual earnings
  • A plan to improve those outcomes (not just recruit more students into the same financial mess)

Then that school shouldn’t be getting any more approvals, expansions, or promotional space in this profession.

If you graduated from NUNM and want to share your story, please do. The more transparency we create, the harder it is for schools to keep running the same predatory playbook on future students.

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