Should medical school be shortened to three years? Some programs try fast tracking.

For Travis Hill, it was an offer too good to refuse. Last year when the 30-year-old neuroscientist was admitted to a new program at New York University that would allow him to complete medical school in only three years and guarantee him a spot in its neurosurgery residency, he seized it. Not only would Hill save about $70,000 the cost of tuition and living expenses for the fourth year of medical school he would also shave a year off the training that will consume the next decade of his life.

Im not interested in being in school forever, said Hill, who earned a PhD from the University of California at Davis in June 2013 and started med school in Manhattan a few weeks later. Just knowing where youre going to be for residency is huge. So is Hills student loan debt: about $200,000, dating back to his undergraduate days at the University of Massachusetts. And he wont begin practicing until he is 40.

The chance to finish medical school early is attracting increased attention from students burdened with six-figure education loans: The median debt for medical school graduates in 2013 was $175,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. This year, the combined cost of tuition and fees for a first-year medical student ranges from just over $12,000 to more than $82,000.

Some medical school administrators and policymakers see three-year programs as a way to produce physicians, particularly primary-care doctors, faster as the new health-care law funnels millions of previously uninsured patients into the medical system. Enormous student loans are cited as one reason some newly minted doctors choose lucrative specialties such as radiology or dermatology, which pay twice as much as pediatrics or family medicine.

But debt and the shortage of primary-care doctors are not the only factors fueling interest in accelerated programs.

Some influential experts are raising questions about the length of medical school in part because much of the fourth year is devoted to electives and applying for a residency, a process that typically takes months. (Similar questions are being raised about the third year of law school.)

In a piece published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2012, University of Pennsylvania Vice Provost Ezekiel Emanuel and Stanford economist Victor Fuchs proposed that a year of medical school could be eliminated without adversely affecting academic performance. The overall time it takes to train physicians, they wrote, is an example of waste in medical education and could be shortened without affecting patient care or eroding clinical skills; students could be assessed on core competencies rather than on time served.

A 2010 report by the Carnegie Foundation recommended that fast-tracking be considered.

So far, fewer than a dozen of the nations 124 medical schools are offering or actively considering three-year programs, which typically involve the elimination of electives, attendance at summer classes and the provisional guarantee of a residency offered because three-year graduates might be at a disadvantage compared with other applicants.

NYU launched its program in September with Hill and 15 other students chosen from a pool of 50 applicants nearly a third of the medical schools 160-member class.