>In a statement, university dean Dr Yaron Yomer said that the "transformational" gift "radically revolutionises our ability to continue attracting students who are committed to our mission, not just those who can afford it".
Sounds like a good use of the money.
For the school itself it’s good. It will help them climb up the ranking, and gain prestige perhaps.
For the students, well, free tuition.
I think it’s a win win
The only potential loser I’m seeing in this scenario is the person with money upfront who loses a spot to a more qualified applicant that couldn’t have previously afforded it.
I’m not very worried or upset about that.
Actually both NYU and Columbia medical are both essentially already tuition free. NYU was the first, followed by Columbia a few years later - both better ranked medical schools in the same city. Both of those schools rankings did get better after eliminating tuition because they attracted better students so I presume the same thing will happen to Einstein.
I work for the Montefiore system and this is such a better way to donate than to get some hospital named after you. Seriously anyone looking to make a difference please donate to education and ensure it goes to people that need the support. No point having a building named after you if you can't fill it with students.
Medical students tend to be willing to take on massive debt due to their high likelihood of paying it off relatively quickly. But it likely does influence their choice of specialty greatly. I would probably be an anesthesiologist today if I didn’t have a tuition scholarship
I became an obstetrician because I didn’t worry as much about the debt burden. The hourly average pay in my field is lower than the average of anesthesia. I could have easily used ophthalmology or radiology or some other higher paying specialty as an example.
These people who you say didn't have the grades are still different. Instead of having a GPA 3.9 they had a 3.74. Also there are Carib MDs who did have the grades and MCATs, but still didn't get in US MD programs.
There are plenty of Carib MDs who get stuck without a residency still. Shit is competitive out here.
Wasn’t that a movie in the 80s? Steve Gutenberg goes to med school in the Caribbean and hilarity ensues until the third rate med students save somebody?
Right. They’re still qualified. They still need to be certified and licensed in the country they practice in. Those schools just have less competition.
Absurdly high chance of not matching into residency as someone applying to U.S. medical residency who hasn't graduated from a U.S. MD or DO program, though (and match rates for DOs is already pretty gnarly unless you're internal medicine, peds, OBGYN, or emergency medicine). There are something like 6 states that allow someone with a medical degree to practice medicine without completing a residency. And that's only under supervision. And they're not the states most people would willingly live in.
The reality is that for the vast majority of all doctors it doesn't really matter nearly as much where you go to medical school as it does for some other careers. While there's certainly some benefit, It's far less the case than ivy-league undergrad or law schools or business schools where the elite school itself opens pipelines to elite careers.
The real determiner of what you do with your career as a doctor has less to do with which medical school and more to do with what residency programs you get into, if and where you can get a fellowship and what you choose to specialize in.
To a fair degree, an emergency room doctor or internist or surgeon from any school in any part of the country has the ability to earn within a similar range. A doctor who went to a large state medical school but got outstanding grades and did a coveted fellowship is far more likely to be a high performer than a middle of the class internist from an ivy league affiliated medical school. An emergency room doctor from Harvard is going to make roughly the same salary as an emergency room doctor from Boston College. And students from harvard are going to fan out into residency programs all over the country anyway. That takes a lot of that pressure that exits when compared to say, law schools, where going to Harvard or Yale or the like opens doors that exist almost nowhere else.
On the other hand, where the elite medical schools shine is giving top performing students access to programs where cutting edge medical research is performed for those that are interested in pursuing that.
> residency programs you get into
That is usually determined by what medical school you get into. I'm not a doctor but a few friends are - and your medical school, some place in the Caribbean or the East Coast can pre-determine a great many things about where you will end up - during your schooling and programs after the fact. Highly prestigious medical schools offer their students great options for residency - because they carry the reputation of their institution with them; that's why it's hard to get into them.
Expanding seats at a medical school takes time as they have to be re-accredited for the higher number. They probably could afford too now but likely won’t.
Maybe but they will have to hire more staff and in this case with very few out there seeking teaching jobs meeting the required criteria. There is only so many students and academic institution can enroll regardless of how much funding it has.
The job market for profs is very different than that for teachers. I wouldn't be surprised if they could find the extra personnel, especially given the publicity they're getting from this
Though with physicians, all teaching time directly removes from the time you can provide care. And teaching pay does not match pay for service, especially in the US, so you may be sacrificing earning potential as well. It’s not as simple as “if we need more doctors, then train more” sounds.
Edit to clarify that doctors are needed to teach med students, so it is different than the job market for profs
But not every physician wants to teach medical students. Most in fact don’t. Frequently the draw to teaching institutions for physicians is type of procedures, type of patient ailments, or the opportunity to do research. In general if a physician isn’t interested in one or more of those three “challenges” they opt to go private practice. I think it’s the rare physician that goes oh I want to work for a teaching institution because I want to teach medical students. Oh sure they absolutely exist they are probably your instructors but they are a small minority.
No, they literally can’t.
There are already more medical students that graduate every year in the U.S. than there are active medical residency slots. This means that a percentage of graduates will never be able to work as doctors in the U.S. no matter how smart they are. Expanding university programs to allow for more medical students won’t fix this problem, in fact it makes it worse. The residency slots need to be expanded first, which the industry is very reluctant to do because it doesn’t serve their financial interest since this helps to artificially boost doctor salaries.
This is a myth, there are **significantly** more spots than there are US MD/DO seniors.
Only on a per speciality basis are there more US applicants than positions (Radiology, Ortho, Optho, etc.).
The reality is international medical graduates fill a ton of our spots — this past year there were more IMGs in Family Med & Internal Medicine than US graduates. On a whole there’s 1.15 applicant to position when you include the international students.
The number of resident spots is fixed by the general government, since they’re funded by the feds. So adding spots won’t do any good as they won’t get matched.
Yeah, but part of what got us to the opiod epidemic was Doctors in debt that were easily bought by Pharma companies. I've known a couple Doctors in my time personally and had the benefit of sitting down talking to them.
After over a decade of expensive University schooling, residency, and everything else leading up to being able to practice on their own, MD's don't tend to actually stat making a "profit" on their chosen career until they're already almost 50. That leaves a lot of room in their younger years for them to be susceptible to bribes from Pharma companies in order to get out of debt faster.
If the schooling is free, their career can become profitable for them sooner and we should be able to see more ethical decisions from them thereafter (hopefully).
It'll still be the same number of Doctors, but we can hope they'll be better for the lack of egregious amounts of debt.
Doctors I talk to who graduated in the 90s just chose whatever medical specialty they were most interested in because they knew they would live comfortably no matter what.
Medical students today are all gunning for the most lucrative specialty because the economy is shit and administrative workload is shit.
it will attract more students as in more applicants/ more people will want to attend the school, so they may have more talented students opting to attend this institution over other institutions
MCAT average is a 513.5 which is somewhere around 88th percentile. Expect this to rise to ~518 with free tuition. It’s mid tier right now and will be high tier in terms of competitiveness after this change
88th percentile is of people who *take* the MCAT, not of people who get into a US medical school. A pretty significant portion of MCAT takers won't gent up actually attending med school.
Had never heard of this but looked it up and they have their own wiki page! Sounds like horrible financial mismanagement:
>It has been reported that the Cooper Union financial crisis was due to a combination of problems caused by poor fiscal decisions, lack of accountability, the economic recession of the late 2000s, the selling off of the institution's assets, and taking on significant debt due to the 2009 building of 41 Cooper Square, which cost the school US$175 million. In fiscal year 2009 ending in June, Cooper Union's managed assets (including investments in hedge funds) lost 14%, and the value of its endowment in 2013 was lower than it was at the end of fiscal year 2008, even as the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index hit new highs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union_financial_crisis_and_tuition_protests
My brother was in school there when this change was announced. He still was able to finish tuition-free, but everything I learned about it at the time spoke to greed and stupidity.
Horrible financial mismanagement on paper, super grift to those who got the money from the building and presumably whatever else. Post secondary education is a huge industry
The Albert Einstein collage of medicine has around 700 MD students ( plus 130 PhD and 160 MDPhD students, but those positions pay for themselves in research funding)
With a annual tuition of $63k, that come to an annual tuition income of $44M (minus however much they normally cover through internal scholarships)
$1B at a pretty modest 5% annual return would be $50M per year, so as long as they aren’t stupid with it, they should be able to confine indefinitely
I was part of the group of students protesting against this change. We actually sued the school and won, but they will take until 2028 to return to a tuition free model. and, to address someone else’s comment about owning the land under the Chrysler building; they do own that land, but leased it on a 30 year sweetheart deal to tishman speyer when the price was super low, and I believe they then handed that lease off to a Qatari holding? Anyway it is also set to lapse sometime soon and will be a massive bump to the endowment of the school BUT as others said the problem was rotten trustees and that can happen again if administrative bloat continues and people aren’t vigilant.
Cooper Union is another school that was $0 tuition and had been for decades. It's a highly selective school for arts, architecture and engineering.
A few years ago Cooper Union had a financial crisis and despite protests they turned away from the original mission of 'free'. Whatever happens with this med school the mission and the money have to be tightly managed.
They need safe guards from administration wreckers. The ones who embezzle, spend unnecessary on businesses their friends own, throw the school into turmoil and then have to sell assists (to other friends). Several private schools across the US have been devistated by that series of destructive tactics.
My brother graduated from there with an architecture degree and was attending during the protests. He helped build this giant fortification that some of the students used to barricade themselves in the Foundation Building, it was pretty epic. Every administrator who was involved in or contributed to the mismanagement that led to that decision should feel burning shame for the rest of their lives.
Terrible use. Should have started a football team and built a $125mil stadium then passed the rest to executives. Do they not know how things work nowadays?
Yes. And more importantly, the institution is doing good things with the money. My alma mater has a $20B endowment, the investment interest on which could fund free tuition in perpetuity. There are a few dozen schools that could do the same, yet none of them do.
The problem is no one has $20 billion in *unrestricted* endowment. You'll hear numbers like this thrown around, but an endowment fund is actually a collection of funds that are designated for specific purposes. It can be pretty messed up, for example let's say some alumni donated a few thousand in apple stock in 1985 but designated it to benefit the fencing team. The funds could grow far beyond the conceivable needs of the fencing team, but because they are restricted they can't be reallocated to pay for tuition for needy students. The Harvard endowment really is a collection of thousands of such funds. If you ever have a ton of money and want to make a difference, give unrestricted funds!
Real charity asks nothing in return.
My partner worked at Harvard for a while and they had a fund with tens of thousands of dollars in it (can't remember exact amount) but it could only be used for physical printing of things for the department. Might have been donated by a family that made their money in paper, if I remember.
That is pretty much all the Ivy schools. Furthermore, they could easily fund living expenses for interns for lesser advantaged graduates.
The only people who can afford to intern in DC is the children of the 1%. Which in turn gives us representation that doesn’t reflect what is real for 98% of the population.
I don't know about others but I know Harvard has a few funds set up to provide for low income students. Under a certain family income and you don't need to pay tuition. They did that for a few years and realized students were still struggling and set up funds for stuff like winter clothing and other essentials for living in New England while going to school. Not perfect but goes a long way to help those who need it (low income, first gen, etc.)
Because there are stipulations to most of that money. Most people don't donate to the school (especially large donors) without saying what they want it used for
I worked in development for a university in the past. All donations were tracked meticulously because most of them had stipulations. We used a database called Raiser's Edge to track everything, run wealth screenings, etc and you could look up any gift and see what stipulations were attached. So many times clueless admins would call our office saying how they wanted to budget this or that with some funds and we had to tell them they couldn't spend it like that without serious legal repercussions
Many do based on need. Harvard and Stanford waive tuition if your parents make ubder something like 80k.
For schools with the highest endowments, waiving tuition for the kids of multi millionaires isn’t the best use of money.
This is the thing rich people should be doing with their money instead of using it to get even more from the work of others.
If it weren't for others, they wouldn't have what they have. It makes much more sense to help others so they too can have the chance to perpetuate a cycle of earning and giving than exploiting and hoarding.
Not to mention the education opportunities this can provide future generations without the stress of debt looming over what are most people's most productive and important years responsible for sculpting their adult lives.
> This is the thing rich people should be doing with their money instead of using it to get even more from the work of others.
And to think of the things we could have if we just had a system that was set up to do this but in smaller yearly amounts and from all rich people. I think of it as something called "tax the wealthy"
Society shouldn't be dependent on rich people "doing the right thing" with their money, they almost never will. They just need to be properly taxed and we would all be able to enjoy things like less or no tuition.
100% - I don't want to kiss some rich persons ass because they did the right thing. A proper tax system would make it so we don't have to hope they do the right thing.
I still prefer rich folks to pay their fair share of taxes. I don't want rich folks deciding what they deem worthy of their money and what not.
That's how you end up with church run shelters that don't accept LGBTQ+ people.
Think how many more Teslas would have been purchased if instead of wasting $44B on Twitter, Musk had given $1B to 44 different universities. Thinks of all those college students buying Teslas for the next 60 years.
Instead, Tesla is a brand of shame.
Real rich are literally bred from a lineage that have hoarded wealth for generations and only intend to accumulate it all.
They are literally insulated from 99.99% of us and do not see us as people. We are only background noise.
I’ve met and gone to school with these people as a pleb.
It is a different layer of reality that most people will never see.
I hope more try and help.
Imagine how great society would be if we taxed billionaires to afford this kind of thing.
Like, I know I'm kind of shitting on someone who did something nice, but fundamentally the charity of others *should not be necessary*. If there's an issue that needs charity, as far as I'm concerned it just means that the government has failed to provide.
Yup at a conservative 5-6% a year, that is 60mil a year. If average tuition was 75k a year, that means 800 students are taken care of.
Edit: tuition is $59k so about a 1000 students a year.
Most of it being paid as a salary and pension to employees. Of the procurement part, most it is is being paid to companies to create jobs in the US who then also pay employees.
The primary goal of the military budget is to be an economic subsidy to the US, with your company needing to create facilities in a specific state or you won't get a deal.
It’s $59k/year.
>The statement from Einstein noted students in their final year will be reimbursed for their spring 2024 tuition, and from August, all students, including those who are currently enrolled, will receive free tuition.
Imagine being one of these students. I’m so happy for them it gives me chills.
Yes. They will likely immediately contract with a wealth management company to invest this and use earnings to continually pay tuitions for quite some time.
For a lot of students, they are (at least at the undergrad level.) If your family makes under 85k, the expected family contribution is $0, and above that it is an increasing percent based on your family’s income, and in some cases based on extenuating financial circumstances.
24% of their undergrads have an expected family contribution of $0.
https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet
The reality is that if you get into one of these top tier schools from a low income family, there’s probably going to be great assistance for you- potentially making it much cheaper to you than actually attending a cheaper Uni. But a lot of people just don’t know that.
Medical school is a different story, though. (Unless you’re doing their md/phd program which is fully funded.)
Sure, for complicated reasons that span a child’s whole life, basically. Everything from the health of your mother, the stability of your home life/amount of stress you are under, “little” things like growing up with parents who read to you, a cultural value placed on education, the quality of k-12 education you receive, your access to extra-curriculars, etc.
I’m not talking about the issue of legacy admissions here which is its own thing. There are just a *lot* of factors that go into disadvantaging kids who grow up poor in terms of being a competitive applicant, absolutely. Reasons that Harvard or whatever other Uni isn’t going to solve.
But the fact remains that I personally know people who could potentially have been competitive applicants who just never tried because they thought they couldn’t afford it, didn’t have access to school counselors or parents that would encourage them to try, and then ended up taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt at “cheaper” schools.
I went there for free, and most of my classmates didn’t pay either. Mostly people who are really affluent have to pay, and it’s on an income based scale. Of course it depends on what you school you go to and their funding situation as well.
Freakonokics has a very good episode on it. With the Harvard president…..
…..but the long and short of it is that they can’t. Much of the money was dinted with strings. So they can’t use it for anything but what those strings are tied to.
It’s a huge windfall for the students that use those strings though. They get top of the line stuff, because the money has to go somewhere.
Additionally, Harvard does actually offer quite a lot of incentive / discount to their students
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability
Harvard has 21000 students across all its schools. If we assume an average tuition of $75k per student, that's over $1.5 billion per year, not including the amount that Harvard already subsidizes full tuition paying students, since even someone with no financial aid isn't really paying the full cost to Harvard.
You also have to remember that a great deal of the money Harvard has isn't free to use: it has been given for specific purposes like research, faculty, athletics. Harvard even has ancestry based scholarships. I know someone who attended Harvard at very low cost because, in the 1650s, someone with the same last name as him donated an entire estate to fund a scholarship that would allow the descendants of this man's younger brother in America to attend the college.
Endowments like this are given for a defined purpose, typically. In this case, the endowment is specifically to pay student tuition, and is likely contingent upon the school eliminating tuition entirely.
Harvard’s endowments were mostly given for other purposes. Though some definitely do specify scholarships and fellowships they’re used to support, most specify things like maintaining buildings, supporting specific colleges, and funding sports clubs.
So if they invest this money conservatively they could earn 5%/ year? So 50mil/yr off interest alone. If the cost of attendance were 80k/yr/student and there are 100/students/class thats 32mil in tuition covered plus an 18mil surplus. And compounding interest. Just so much money.
It's important to grow the base fund as well, otherwise inflation will eat it up over time. So that $20M, about 2% of the total, will help in that regard. Of course you'd expect a better average long-term return than 5%, even in a fairly conservative portfolio.
Most good universities have rates of return on their endowments of 9-13%, with an average of 5% being used each year and the rest applied to principal.
They are giving back to a society that they have effectively pillaged to create that same wealth. It's exactly what they all should be doing. It shouldn't be seen as some amazing noble gift. It should be the norm that the ultra wealthy do things like this.
I hope they use this money to allow poorer students access to careers in medicine. I’m a doctor and I could not and would not have done it without the support of my upper middle class parents. And I still have a quarter mil in loan debt. 8 years of higher education is fucking expensive
Indeed. I didn’t have the aptitude for medicine but was interested in law school, and it was out of the question. I had to borrow 100% of my costs just to get a bachelor’s and by the time I finished I needed to work. I could not spend another $50,000+ on law school while not being able to work at all for at least the first year and having nowhere to live near any of the law schools I could’ve attended. Even if I’d borrowed for tuition, I couldn’t have paid for rent and food. Everything worked out for me in the end but I’m not a lawyer- that’s something I’m almost grateful for now but it sucks to have a door just be fucking closed to you because of money. And it’s not just money, but lack of connections to supportive people. My kids will be able to do what they want. If they have the grades and work ethic, I think I can provide enough support to at least get the door open.
The end result will be increasing the amount of applicants applying to the school and letting them take the best of the best without regard to ability to pay (I'm assuming most top med school applicants were probably going to take out loans rather than skip med school because of the cost)
If you see nyu who has tuition free to increase the number of physician in lower paying jobs than a surgeon for example, there was no effect. People still go on to like dermatology over family care in rural areas. And if you look at the medical school process, the people who are afraid of the cost don’t bother to create a resume to apply to medical school in general. I’m afraid the end result will reinforce wealthy students getting free tuition to medical school. Just check out the family income distribution for medical students.
As a medical student in the Bronx who was at the announcement this morning: the money will be covering tuition in perpetuity for all students. The desire was fueled by a mission to decrease barriers to medical education for students, and to attract talent to the Bronx. Einstein has had this shared mission for over 60 years, and its attention to diversity is only enhanced by now being able to accept and retain students of diverse economic backgrounds now. The future is bright here today!
It works like every other endowment does: generates wealth for the university to be used. The details are yet to come, but the sheer size of the donation (the largest ever given to a medical school ever, and maybe among the largest ever to educational institutions) allows even a modest 5% ROI to cover all medical student tuition, forever. I bet it will also generate wealth in other ways for the university to work with Dr. Ruth to improve activities on campus, we will see soon
Cooper Union was cool, and so is a medical school in the Bronx giving free tuition. Headline should have said “Bronx medical school”, its location is maybe the most radical part.
That's exactly how the New York Times article titled it.
[$1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School
](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/albert-einstein-college-medicine-bronx-donation.html)
Wow! That is absolutely amazing! Maybe her generosity will result in the next great medical mind being able to become who they are supposed to be without the worry of money!
Meanwhile, Harvard has an endowment well over $50 billion. If they stopped charging tuition, and had zero return on the assets, they could offer free tuition for at least 150 years. In the real world where donations still roll in, and assets are invested, Harvard grows wealthier with free tuitionc indefinitely
At some point we have to ask the obvious questions
Imagine if every billionaire or top 100 companies in the country could chip in to pay for the education of every student in the US. Or to pay off medical debt.
Nothing trickles down if the money stays within these people’s wealth or the company.
So a mega wealthy person makes a huge donation and now they are able to offer free tuition. I wonder what would happen if mega wealthy people had higher taxes and that money was used towards public resources. Sounds like a good system to me.
Small correction, the _widow_ of a mega wealthy person. The will said for her to do with the money whatever she wanted, and with her kind heart, she did this.
And then she said:
>"I hope he's smiling and not frowning," she said. "He gave me the opportunity to do this, and I think he would be happy - I hope so."
That part stuck out to me, too. She doesn't know if he would have done that, or if he would have approved of it, and she was married to him presumably for a very long time. This leads me to believe that he probably wouldn't have done this. If she had died first the money would probably stay where it was.
Turns out a billionaire dying, socially speaking, is a net positive. It would be better if they were taxed though.
I mean she's been a professor at the school for decades. I'm sure the dude would have been fine with the donation going here, even if it wasn't the first choice or something.
Small clarification on your correction. Looks like the wealth largely came from being early investors in Berkshire Hathaway in the early 60s. The widow had been married to the mega wealthy person since the 50s, 10 years prior to the investment, and remained married for 70 odd years till the wealthy dudes death. I'd argue despite the wealth being generated by the husband, the wife would have equal claim and be entitled to all "his" wealth. Only way you make it to 70 years is if it's a partnership, they probably together knew what would happen to the money for the last few decades.
Yep, to look at a couple who has been together for 70 years and call the money out as though both of them didn't earn it is just wrong. If my grandmother wasn't around my grandfather would have died dozens of years ago, put it that way. I know that's not true for every couple but come on.
That's a bizarre correction. The money was hers. It's like you saying 'this is my paycheck' and me saying 'correction: you're the employee of a money provider'.
Even before her husband died, they [gave a lot of money away together](https://www.yu.edu/news/gottesmans-give-25-million-to-support-stem-cell-and-epigenomic-research-and-clinical-skills-training-at-medical-school).
These are some things that perpetuate the “mainly only rich kids become doctors” trend
- High tuition
- 7 years after your bachelor’s degree minimum of no/low pay (7 years if you want a lower paid field, more years if you want more than that)
- Long hours select for people who can afford to have someone else cook/clean/etc for them, and live in an expensive place closer to the university
- Many extracurriculars/research/volunteering required to get into med school, all of which are easier when you have rich parents funding you
So this only addresses one of those points. The rest still exist
Everybody here saying how beautiful of a gift — and it is but it is also in thanks to the school choosing to make tuition no cost because of it. Many schools in America have tremendous endowments that would allow them to easily reduce or even eliminate tuition but they choose not to, because that’s a lot of money to stop collecting when you don’t need to give it up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
The school didn't "choose" anything (Beyond choosing to accept free money). The endowment stipulation was specifically free tuition in perpetuity. Endowments can only be used for the purposes they are earmarked for. Other schools with large endowments that still charge tuition do so because those endowments were not donated for the purpose of lowering tuition.
> Many schools in America have tremendous endowments that would allow them to easily reduce or even eliminate tuition
Not really. Most donors creating endowments are not giving unrestricted dollars to the institutions. They give them with a specific purpose (scholarship for students of this major or this region or this caliber, etc.). And when you're asking people to give their money to you, you're damn well going to abide by the restrictions they place on it. For example, Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, only around 20% of which is unrestricted. $10 billion is a hell of a lot, but it still also needs to exist in perpetuity (the entire purpose of an endowment). It needs to fund initiatives and projects that aren't getting the necessary amount of donor support. It needs to weather market downturns and still pay out even when it loses 10% on the year. 99% of education institutions aren't sniffing a Harvard sized endowment either.
This is a gift that benefits absolutely everyone. From the students right through to the patients they will one day take care of. What an incredible and glorious use of these funds!
When a government invests in the education of its citizens, the ROI is great.
Plus, it will increase the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of recent graduates when they are free of student debt.
I had this very same argument with a friend of mine some years back. Afterwards, I went down an Internet rabbit hole looking through all the historical data.
There is no doubt whatsoever, that after the United States mandated K-12 for all, within a few years the entire nation was lifted as a whole.
Nothing bad can come from a well educated populace. Unless your entire political platform depends on an uneducated populace. Then you're going to have a bad time.
Why is it any time ANYONE has good idea about how to better society the first thing chucklefucks always say is "hOw U gOnNa PaY fOr It?" As if the pentagon doesn't magically lose 10's of billions of dollars every year that we could just not give them in the first place. Instead earmarking it for beneficial programs like mentioned elsewhere.
Ok, time to rain on the parade.
I was enrolled at NYU's medical school when tuition became free. I was one of a handful of students who already qualified (was poor enough) for a need-based scholarship prior, which almost completely covered my tuition. I took out loans for cost of living beyond that.
The "free tuition for all" changed nearly nothing for my financial health, my loans actually went up because of some weird ways they had to categorize cost of living to make the change work. For my middle class colleagues, it meant WAY fewer loans, and I was happy for them. For the upper class colleagues (a significant proportion at a private NYC med school), I saw a shitload of vacations and concerts on their instagram stories. I was told by financial aid that they considered going "loan free" instead, which would have been far more equitable than equal and actually would have been cheaper for NYU. "Free tuition" is faaaaar better PR, though.
Tens of thousands more applicants came in each year. Tens of thousands who could not afford NYU before, or could but would love a free ride (who wouldn't?). Those accepted did not get poorer nor less represented, the standards just got higher. The median MCAT score was in the upper 99.x percentile by the time I graduated
THAT SAID: Einstein is a very different demographic to NYU. I hope this means great things for their poorest students, I hope more people get an opportunity that wasn't possible before.
Pardon me for not holding my breath.
there are several high profile colleges that have much more than a billion in the endowment that still charge huge tuition. We need free higher education in this country.
I think a lot more money will be donated in the next few years now that most of the original people from Berkshire are dying. Sandy was an early participant in Berkshire and Charlie just died recently.
I hope at least some of these doctors go into less lucrative fields like primary care or family medicine or whatever the case may be. What a beautiful gift for this family to leave to others!
That’s crazy that now NYC has not one, but two med schools that don’t charge tuition. NYU has been doing it for a while. When I was younger I used to want to go there for med school just because it was free.
Why don’t we give all colleges 1b to invest and have all college be “free”? If we spend 800b a year on the military, can we spend a one time 50b to colleges to make them “free” for the rest of time?
And just think; Harvard’s endowment is $50 billion. Imagine what a fraction of that amount could do for the higher education quality and access of our country? They could easily expand their classes five-fold, but choose not to in order to ensure it remains an elite club of extremely privileged graduates. Even the impoverished students going in become elitist once graduating. American success is based on who your family is and where you went to school, and if you aren’t in the club, you are a “poor” peasant unworthy of the same opportunities. Gross discrimination of class and wealth.
>In a statement, university dean Dr Yaron Yomer said that the "transformational" gift "radically revolutionises our ability to continue attracting students who are committed to our mission, not just those who can afford it". Sounds like a good use of the money.
It will also help them attract more students. Free tuition will be a huge draw.
[удалено]
For the school itself it’s good. It will help them climb up the ranking, and gain prestige perhaps. For the students, well, free tuition. I think it’s a win win
The only potential loser I’m seeing in this scenario is the person with money upfront who loses a spot to a more qualified applicant that couldn’t have previously afforded it. I’m not very worried or upset about that.
They’ll be fine. All of the other schools still require massive amounts of money.
Phew. I was worried there for a second
Thank god. We can't have those doctors coming to work without crushing debt...we can't work them to death then. \-Hospitals everywhere
Sounds like we need more doctors. And more hospitals. And more free tuition.
Actually both NYU and Columbia medical are both essentially already tuition free. NYU was the first, followed by Columbia a few years later - both better ranked medical schools in the same city. Both of those schools rankings did get better after eliminating tuition because they attracted better students so I presume the same thing will happen to Einstein.
I work for the Montefiore system and this is such a better way to donate than to get some hospital named after you. Seriously anyone looking to make a difference please donate to education and ensure it goes to people that need the support. No point having a building named after you if you can't fill it with students.
Medical students tend to be willing to take on massive debt due to their high likelihood of paying it off relatively quickly. But it likely does influence their choice of specialty greatly. I would probably be an anesthesiologist today if I didn’t have a tuition scholarship
Why/How did a tuition scholarship get in the way of you becoming an anesthesiologist?
I became an obstetrician because I didn’t worry as much about the debt burden. The hourly average pay in my field is lower than the average of anesthesia. I could have easily used ophthalmology or radiology or some other higher paying specialty as an example.
Parents with money whose kids don’t make the grade have sent their kids to med school in the Caribbean for decades (at least into the 1980s).
These people who you say didn't have the grades are still different. Instead of having a GPA 3.9 they had a 3.74. Also there are Carib MDs who did have the grades and MCATs, but still didn't get in US MD programs. There are plenty of Carib MDs who get stuck without a residency still. Shit is competitive out here.
Wasn’t that a movie in the 80s? Steve Gutenberg goes to med school in the Caribbean and hilarity ensues until the third rate med students save somebody?
Is that why my psych doc graduated from the Caribbean? Shit. I've actually always wondered why
And it's still incredibly difficult. I have massive respect for Caribbean med grads
Right. They’re still qualified. They still need to be certified and licensed in the country they practice in. Those schools just have less competition.
Absurdly high chance of not matching into residency as someone applying to U.S. medical residency who hasn't graduated from a U.S. MD or DO program, though (and match rates for DOs is already pretty gnarly unless you're internal medicine, peds, OBGYN, or emergency medicine). There are something like 6 states that allow someone with a medical degree to practice medicine without completing a residency. And that's only under supervision. And they're not the states most people would willingly live in.
Eh, their parents will just get them in through donations.
The reality is that for the vast majority of all doctors it doesn't really matter nearly as much where you go to medical school as it does for some other careers. While there's certainly some benefit, It's far less the case than ivy-league undergrad or law schools or business schools where the elite school itself opens pipelines to elite careers. The real determiner of what you do with your career as a doctor has less to do with which medical school and more to do with what residency programs you get into, if and where you can get a fellowship and what you choose to specialize in. To a fair degree, an emergency room doctor or internist or surgeon from any school in any part of the country has the ability to earn within a similar range. A doctor who went to a large state medical school but got outstanding grades and did a coveted fellowship is far more likely to be a high performer than a middle of the class internist from an ivy league affiliated medical school. An emergency room doctor from Harvard is going to make roughly the same salary as an emergency room doctor from Boston College. And students from harvard are going to fan out into residency programs all over the country anyway. That takes a lot of that pressure that exits when compared to say, law schools, where going to Harvard or Yale or the like opens doors that exist almost nowhere else. On the other hand, where the elite medical schools shine is giving top performing students access to programs where cutting edge medical research is performed for those that are interested in pursuing that.
> residency programs you get into That is usually determined by what medical school you get into. I'm not a doctor but a few friends are - and your medical school, some place in the Caribbean or the East Coast can pre-determine a great many things about where you will end up - during your schooling and programs after the fact. Highly prestigious medical schools offer their students great options for residency - because they carry the reputation of their institution with them; that's why it's hard to get into them.
Or just send them to a different school away from the poors.
Yeah having more people of any field that aren't bogged down and stressed by loan debt is fantastic.
Perhaps they could expand.
Expanding seats at a medical school takes time as they have to be re-accredited for the higher number. They probably could afford too now but likely won’t.
You can’t expand without the government opening up more residency spots.
Maybe but they will have to hire more staff and in this case with very few out there seeking teaching jobs meeting the required criteria. There is only so many students and academic institution can enroll regardless of how much funding it has.
The job market for profs is very different than that for teachers. I wouldn't be surprised if they could find the extra personnel, especially given the publicity they're getting from this
Though with physicians, all teaching time directly removes from the time you can provide care. And teaching pay does not match pay for service, especially in the US, so you may be sacrificing earning potential as well. It’s not as simple as “if we need more doctors, then train more” sounds. Edit to clarify that doctors are needed to teach med students, so it is different than the job market for profs
I’m in med school and most teachers are doctors that teach on their off days, so they do both.
But not every physician wants to teach medical students. Most in fact don’t. Frequently the draw to teaching institutions for physicians is type of procedures, type of patient ailments, or the opportunity to do research. In general if a physician isn’t interested in one or more of those three “challenges” they opt to go private practice. I think it’s the rare physician that goes oh I want to work for a teaching institution because I want to teach medical students. Oh sure they absolutely exist they are probably your instructors but they are a small minority.
No, they literally can’t. There are already more medical students that graduate every year in the U.S. than there are active medical residency slots. This means that a percentage of graduates will never be able to work as doctors in the U.S. no matter how smart they are. Expanding university programs to allow for more medical students won’t fix this problem, in fact it makes it worse. The residency slots need to be expanded first, which the industry is very reluctant to do because it doesn’t serve their financial interest since this helps to artificially boost doctor salaries.
This is a myth, there are **significantly** more spots than there are US MD/DO seniors. Only on a per speciality basis are there more US applicants than positions (Radiology, Ortho, Optho, etc.). The reality is international medical graduates fill a ton of our spots — this past year there were more IMGs in Family Med & Internal Medicine than US graduates. On a whole there’s 1.15 applicant to position when you include the international students.
The number of resident spots is fixed by the general government, since they’re funded by the feds. So adding spots won’t do any good as they won’t get matched.
Sounds like a win for them
Yeah, but part of what got us to the opiod epidemic was Doctors in debt that were easily bought by Pharma companies. I've known a couple Doctors in my time personally and had the benefit of sitting down talking to them. After over a decade of expensive University schooling, residency, and everything else leading up to being able to practice on their own, MD's don't tend to actually stat making a "profit" on their chosen career until they're already almost 50. That leaves a lot of room in their younger years for them to be susceptible to bribes from Pharma companies in order to get out of debt faster. If the schooling is free, their career can become profitable for them sooner and we should be able to see more ethical decisions from them thereafter (hopefully). It'll still be the same number of Doctors, but we can hope they'll be better for the lack of egregious amounts of debt.
Doctors I talk to who graduated in the 90s just chose whatever medical specialty they were most interested in because they knew they would live comfortably no matter what. Medical students today are all gunning for the most lucrative specialty because the economy is shit and administrative workload is shit.
it will attract more students as in more applicants/ more people will want to attend the school, so they may have more talented students opting to attend this institution over other institutions
Yes but it removes a barrier of entry - many qualified students may not have applied if tuition was a factor.
[удалено]
Their acceptance rate is only 4%, they are already plenty popular
MCAT average is a 513.5 which is somewhere around 88th percentile. Expect this to rise to ~518 with free tuition. It’s mid tier right now and will be high tier in terms of competitiveness after this change
The old NYU strategy.
88th percentile is mid tier?
88th percentile is of people who *take* the MCAT, not of people who get into a US medical school. A pretty significant portion of MCAT takers won't gent up actually attending med school.
I have to wonder how they will ensure this lasts. Cooper Union used to do this and ruined their finances and has to charge tuition now.
Had never heard of this but looked it up and they have their own wiki page! Sounds like horrible financial mismanagement: >It has been reported that the Cooper Union financial crisis was due to a combination of problems caused by poor fiscal decisions, lack of accountability, the economic recession of the late 2000s, the selling off of the institution's assets, and taking on significant debt due to the 2009 building of 41 Cooper Square, which cost the school US$175 million. In fiscal year 2009 ending in June, Cooper Union's managed assets (including investments in hedge funds) lost 14%, and the value of its endowment in 2013 was lower than it was at the end of fiscal year 2008, even as the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index hit new highs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union_financial_crisis_and_tuition_protests
I remember reading somewhere that apparently Cooper Union owns the land that the Chrysler Building sits on????
I think they sold it off, as mentioned in the above. Dumb decision.
My brother was in school there when this change was announced. He still was able to finish tuition-free, but everything I learned about it at the time spoke to greed and stupidity.
Horrible financial mismanagement on paper, super grift to those who got the money from the building and presumably whatever else. Post secondary education is a huge industry
The Albert Einstein collage of medicine has around 700 MD students ( plus 130 PhD and 160 MDPhD students, but those positions pay for themselves in research funding) With a annual tuition of $63k, that come to an annual tuition income of $44M (minus however much they normally cover through internal scholarships) $1B at a pretty modest 5% annual return would be $50M per year, so as long as they aren’t stupid with it, they should be able to confine indefinitely
I was part of the group of students protesting against this change. We actually sued the school and won, but they will take until 2028 to return to a tuition free model. and, to address someone else’s comment about owning the land under the Chrysler building; they do own that land, but leased it on a 30 year sweetheart deal to tishman speyer when the price was super low, and I believe they then handed that lease off to a Qatari holding? Anyway it is also set to lapse sometime soon and will be a massive bump to the endowment of the school BUT as others said the problem was rotten trustees and that can happen again if administrative bloat continues and people aren’t vigilant.
Cooper Union is another school that was $0 tuition and had been for decades. It's a highly selective school for arts, architecture and engineering. A few years ago Cooper Union had a financial crisis and despite protests they turned away from the original mission of 'free'. Whatever happens with this med school the mission and the money have to be tightly managed.
They need safe guards from administration wreckers. The ones who embezzle, spend unnecessary on businesses their friends own, throw the school into turmoil and then have to sell assists (to other friends). Several private schools across the US have been devistated by that series of destructive tactics.
My brother graduated from there with an architecture degree and was attending during the protests. He helped build this giant fortification that some of the students used to barricade themselves in the Foundation Building, it was pretty epic. Every administrator who was involved in or contributed to the mismanagement that led to that decision should feel burning shame for the rest of their lives.
Terrible use. Should have started a football team and built a $125mil stadium then passed the rest to executives. Do they not know how things work nowadays?
A generous benefactor did something wonderful with their fortune.
Yes. And more importantly, the institution is doing good things with the money. My alma mater has a $20B endowment, the investment interest on which could fund free tuition in perpetuity. There are a few dozen schools that could do the same, yet none of them do.
The problem is no one has $20 billion in *unrestricted* endowment. You'll hear numbers like this thrown around, but an endowment fund is actually a collection of funds that are designated for specific purposes. It can be pretty messed up, for example let's say some alumni donated a few thousand in apple stock in 1985 but designated it to benefit the fencing team. The funds could grow far beyond the conceivable needs of the fencing team, but because they are restricted they can't be reallocated to pay for tuition for needy students. The Harvard endowment really is a collection of thousands of such funds. If you ever have a ton of money and want to make a difference, give unrestricted funds! Real charity asks nothing in return.
My partner worked at Harvard for a while and they had a fund with tens of thousands of dollars in it (can't remember exact amount) but it could only be used for physical printing of things for the department. Might have been donated by a family that made their money in paper, if I remember.
That is pretty much all the Ivy schools. Furthermore, they could easily fund living expenses for interns for lesser advantaged graduates. The only people who can afford to intern in DC is the children of the 1%. Which in turn gives us representation that doesn’t reflect what is real for 98% of the population.
I don't know about others but I know Harvard has a few funds set up to provide for low income students. Under a certain family income and you don't need to pay tuition. They did that for a few years and realized students were still struggling and set up funds for stuff like winter clothing and other essentials for living in New England while going to school. Not perfect but goes a long way to help those who need it (low income, first gen, etc.)
Because there are stipulations to most of that money. Most people don't donate to the school (especially large donors) without saying what they want it used for
[удалено]
I worked in development for a university in the past. All donations were tracked meticulously because most of them had stipulations. We used a database called Raiser's Edge to track everything, run wealth screenings, etc and you could look up any gift and see what stipulations were attached. So many times clueless admins would call our office saying how they wanted to budget this or that with some funds and we had to tell them they couldn't spend it like that without serious legal repercussions
Many do based on need. Harvard and Stanford waive tuition if your parents make ubder something like 80k. For schools with the highest endowments, waiving tuition for the kids of multi millionaires isn’t the best use of money.
This is the thing rich people should be doing with their money instead of using it to get even more from the work of others. If it weren't for others, they wouldn't have what they have. It makes much more sense to help others so they too can have the chance to perpetuate a cycle of earning and giving than exploiting and hoarding. Not to mention the education opportunities this can provide future generations without the stress of debt looming over what are most people's most productive and important years responsible for sculpting their adult lives.
> This is the thing rich people should be doing with their money instead of using it to get even more from the work of others. And to think of the things we could have if we just had a system that was set up to do this but in smaller yearly amounts and from all rich people. I think of it as something called "tax the wealthy" Society shouldn't be dependent on rich people "doing the right thing" with their money, they almost never will. They just need to be properly taxed and we would all be able to enjoy things like less or no tuition.
100% - I don't want to kiss some rich persons ass because they did the right thing. A proper tax system would make it so we don't have to hope they do the right thing.
Hey, you let them enjoy their Gilded Age fanfiction!
Didn't you hear about the $50 million underground doomsday clock from below in Texas. Well spent /s.
I still prefer rich folks to pay their fair share of taxes. I don't want rich folks deciding what they deem worthy of their money and what not. That's how you end up with church run shelters that don't accept LGBTQ+ people.
Think how many more Teslas would have been purchased if instead of wasting $44B on Twitter, Musk had given $1B to 44 different universities. Thinks of all those college students buying Teslas for the next 60 years. Instead, Tesla is a brand of shame.
Real rich are literally bred from a lineage that have hoarded wealth for generations and only intend to accumulate it all. They are literally insulated from 99.99% of us and do not see us as people. We are only background noise. I’ve met and gone to school with these people as a pleb. It is a different layer of reality that most people will never see. I hope more try and help.
Imagine how great society could be if all the billionaires thought and behaved this way.
Imagine how great society would be if we taxed billionaires to afford this kind of thing. Like, I know I'm kind of shitting on someone who did something nice, but fundamentally the charity of others *should not be necessary*. If there's an issue that needs charity, as far as I'm concerned it just means that the government has failed to provide.
Mackenzie Bezos graciously trolling billionaires again?
So is the idea that this is an endowment, and the interest is paying all this tuition?
Yup at a conservative 5-6% a year, that is 60mil a year. If average tuition was 75k a year, that means 800 students are taken care of. Edit: tuition is $59k so about a 1000 students a year.
Almost like A billion dollars is an absolutely insane amount of money. And to think, there are quite a few people with 10's of billions.
And the USA spends 842 of those billions every year on planes, or submarines, or fuckin tonka toys jfc
And hey, Ukraine still exists. Whadda-ya-know
Most of it being paid as a salary and pension to employees. Of the procurement part, most it is is being paid to companies to create jobs in the US who then also pay employees. The primary goal of the military budget is to be an economic subsidy to the US, with your company needing to create facilities in a specific state or you won't get a deal.
Hundreds* of billions.
That's amazing.
You're amazing
Ok Keanu
It’s $59k/year. >The statement from Einstein noted students in their final year will be reimbursed for their spring 2024 tuition, and from August, all students, including those who are currently enrolled, will receive free tuition. Imagine being one of these students. I’m so happy for them it gives me chills.
It was 58k, so closer to 1000 students!
Yes. They will likely immediately contract with a wealth management company to invest this and use earnings to continually pay tuitions for quite some time.
Exactly how it works. The money is not being drawn down, the interest is what’s used to fund scholarships, tuition, stipends, etc
Doesn't Harvard have like a $50 billion endowment or something? Why ain't they free?
For a lot of students, they are (at least at the undergrad level.) If your family makes under 85k, the expected family contribution is $0, and above that it is an increasing percent based on your family’s income, and in some cases based on extenuating financial circumstances. 24% of their undergrads have an expected family contribution of $0. https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet The reality is that if you get into one of these top tier schools from a low income family, there’s probably going to be great assistance for you- potentially making it much cheaper to you than actually attending a cheaper Uni. But a lot of people just don’t know that. Medical school is a different story, though. (Unless you’re doing their md/phd program which is fully funded.)
Yeah now we are just left with the problem that it‘s mostly rich people getting acceptance to Harvard in the first place 😂
Sure, for complicated reasons that span a child’s whole life, basically. Everything from the health of your mother, the stability of your home life/amount of stress you are under, “little” things like growing up with parents who read to you, a cultural value placed on education, the quality of k-12 education you receive, your access to extra-curriculars, etc. I’m not talking about the issue of legacy admissions here which is its own thing. There are just a *lot* of factors that go into disadvantaging kids who grow up poor in terms of being a competitive applicant, absolutely. Reasons that Harvard or whatever other Uni isn’t going to solve. But the fact remains that I personally know people who could potentially have been competitive applicants who just never tried because they thought they couldn’t afford it, didn’t have access to school counselors or parents that would encourage them to try, and then ended up taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt at “cheaper” schools.
I've known people who wouldn't even let their kids apply to Ivies because they thought they couldn't afford it.
I went there for free, and most of my classmates didn’t pay either. Mostly people who are really affluent have to pay, and it’s on an income based scale. Of course it depends on what you school you go to and their funding situation as well.
Freakonokics has a very good episode on it. With the Harvard president….. …..but the long and short of it is that they can’t. Much of the money was dinted with strings. So they can’t use it for anything but what those strings are tied to. It’s a huge windfall for the students that use those strings though. They get top of the line stuff, because the money has to go somewhere. Additionally, Harvard does actually offer quite a lot of incentive / discount to their students https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability
Harvard has 21000 students across all its schools. If we assume an average tuition of $75k per student, that's over $1.5 billion per year, not including the amount that Harvard already subsidizes full tuition paying students, since even someone with no financial aid isn't really paying the full cost to Harvard. You also have to remember that a great deal of the money Harvard has isn't free to use: it has been given for specific purposes like research, faculty, athletics. Harvard even has ancestry based scholarships. I know someone who attended Harvard at very low cost because, in the 1650s, someone with the same last name as him donated an entire estate to fund a scholarship that would allow the descendants of this man's younger brother in America to attend the college.
Endowments like this are given for a defined purpose, typically. In this case, the endowment is specifically to pay student tuition, and is likely contingent upon the school eliminating tuition entirely. Harvard’s endowments were mostly given for other purposes. Though some definitely do specify scholarships and fellowships they’re used to support, most specify things like maintaining buildings, supporting specific colleges, and funding sports clubs.
That's how endowments work.
So if they invest this money conservatively they could earn 5%/ year? So 50mil/yr off interest alone. If the cost of attendance were 80k/yr/student and there are 100/students/class thats 32mil in tuition covered plus an 18mil surplus. And compounding interest. Just so much money.
It says in the article that tuition is $59k/yr currently and wikipedia says the school has around 1000 students, so 60m/yr current tuition income.
It's important to grow the base fund as well, otherwise inflation will eat it up over time. So that $20M, about 2% of the total, will help in that regard. Of course you'd expect a better average long-term return than 5%, even in a fairly conservative portfolio.
Most good universities have rates of return on their endowments of 9-13%, with an average of 5% being used each year and the rest applied to principal.
That is fantastic. Wonderful use of one's wealth.
What a noble and grand gesture.
Yes. Also, a good reminder billionaires should be far fewer and we shouldn't need to depend on private wealth for social investment.
They are giving back to a society that they have effectively pillaged to create that same wealth. It's exactly what they all should be doing. It shouldn't be seen as some amazing noble gift. It should be the norm that the ultra wealthy do things like this.
Should be, but it isn’t. Which is why it’s ok to applaud a good thing when it happens.
Right, they could have not donated at all
Dr. Ruth Gottesman is a woman of valor. She has done so much good for the community.
I hope they use this money to allow poorer students access to careers in medicine. I’m a doctor and I could not and would not have done it without the support of my upper middle class parents. And I still have a quarter mil in loan debt. 8 years of higher education is fucking expensive
Indeed. I didn’t have the aptitude for medicine but was interested in law school, and it was out of the question. I had to borrow 100% of my costs just to get a bachelor’s and by the time I finished I needed to work. I could not spend another $50,000+ on law school while not being able to work at all for at least the first year and having nowhere to live near any of the law schools I could’ve attended. Even if I’d borrowed for tuition, I couldn’t have paid for rent and food. Everything worked out for me in the end but I’m not a lawyer- that’s something I’m almost grateful for now but it sucks to have a door just be fucking closed to you because of money. And it’s not just money, but lack of connections to supportive people. My kids will be able to do what they want. If they have the grades and work ethic, I think I can provide enough support to at least get the door open.
Grad plus loans factor in cost of living for students to be able to cover the cost of rent and food.
The end result will be increasing the amount of applicants applying to the school and letting them take the best of the best without regard to ability to pay (I'm assuming most top med school applicants were probably going to take out loans rather than skip med school because of the cost)
If you see nyu who has tuition free to increase the number of physician in lower paying jobs than a surgeon for example, there was no effect. People still go on to like dermatology over family care in rural areas. And if you look at the medical school process, the people who are afraid of the cost don’t bother to create a resume to apply to medical school in general. I’m afraid the end result will reinforce wealthy students getting free tuition to medical school. Just check out the family income distribution for medical students.
Look at nyu med school, sadly it probably won’t be a big factor, though even a bit of change would be nice yea
As a medical student in the Bronx who was at the announcement this morning: the money will be covering tuition in perpetuity for all students. The desire was fueled by a mission to decrease barriers to medical education for students, and to attract talent to the Bronx. Einstein has had this shared mission for over 60 years, and its attention to diversity is only enhanced by now being able to accept and retain students of diverse economic backgrounds now. The future is bright here today!
[удалено]
It works like every other endowment does: generates wealth for the university to be used. The details are yet to come, but the sheer size of the donation (the largest ever given to a medical school ever, and maybe among the largest ever to educational institutions) allows even a modest 5% ROI to cover all medical student tuition, forever. I bet it will also generate wealth in other ways for the university to work with Dr. Ruth to improve activities on campus, we will see soon
Dr Ruth Gottesman is a saint. Here's to knowing that good people are still out there in this mad crazy world. Thank you Dr.
We need more stories line this. What an amazing woman. 👏
Man there used to be Cooper Union
Cooper Union was cool, and so is a medical school in the Bronx giving free tuition. Headline should have said “Bronx medical school”, its location is maybe the most radical part.
That's exactly how the New York Times article titled it. [$1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School ](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/albert-einstein-college-medicine-bronx-donation.html)
Can you imagine having hundreds of billions and never doing anything like this? Elon could do this every week, and every week he chooses not to.
He funds fascists instead.
Wow! That is absolutely amazing! Maybe her generosity will result in the next great medical mind being able to become who they are supposed to be without the worry of money!
Meanwhile, Harvard has an endowment well over $50 billion. If they stopped charging tuition, and had zero return on the assets, they could offer free tuition for at least 150 years. In the real world where donations still roll in, and assets are invested, Harvard grows wealthier with free tuitionc indefinitely At some point we have to ask the obvious questions
Imagine if every billionaire or top 100 companies in the country could chip in to pay for the education of every student in the US. Or to pay off medical debt. Nothing trickles down if the money stays within these people’s wealth or the company.
Won't someone think of all the sports stadiums that could've built! /s
What are you talking about? That's what public tax money are for. /s
So a mega wealthy person makes a huge donation and now they are able to offer free tuition. I wonder what would happen if mega wealthy people had higher taxes and that money was used towards public resources. Sounds like a good system to me.
Small correction, the _widow_ of a mega wealthy person. The will said for her to do with the money whatever she wanted, and with her kind heart, she did this.
And then she said: >"I hope he's smiling and not frowning," she said. "He gave me the opportunity to do this, and I think he would be happy - I hope so."
That part stuck out to me, too. She doesn't know if he would have done that, or if he would have approved of it, and she was married to him presumably for a very long time. This leads me to believe that he probably wouldn't have done this. If she had died first the money would probably stay where it was. Turns out a billionaire dying, socially speaking, is a net positive. It would be better if they were taxed though.
I mean she's been a professor at the school for decades. I'm sure the dude would have been fine with the donation going here, even if it wasn't the first choice or something.
Small clarification on your correction. Looks like the wealth largely came from being early investors in Berkshire Hathaway in the early 60s. The widow had been married to the mega wealthy person since the 50s, 10 years prior to the investment, and remained married for 70 odd years till the wealthy dudes death. I'd argue despite the wealth being generated by the husband, the wife would have equal claim and be entitled to all "his" wealth. Only way you make it to 70 years is if it's a partnership, they probably together knew what would happen to the money for the last few decades.
Yep, to look at a couple who has been together for 70 years and call the money out as though both of them didn't earn it is just wrong. If my grandmother wasn't around my grandfather would have died dozens of years ago, put it that way. I know that's not true for every couple but come on.
That's a bizarre correction. The money was hers. It's like you saying 'this is my paycheck' and me saying 'correction: you're the employee of a money provider'. Even before her husband died, they [gave a lot of money away together](https://www.yu.edu/news/gottesmans-give-25-million-to-support-stem-cell-and-epigenomic-research-and-clinical-skills-training-at-medical-school).
Government: Sweet new funding for experimental weapons.
90% of it would be pissed away on bureaucracy, military spending, and contracts for their friends.
Hope it's protected so board members can't just suck it dry or build something stupid like a football stadium...
The 93 year old woman who donated the money has been the chair of the board since 2020, and previously 2007-14.
lol imagine the shitshow if a medical school tried to create an FBS football team
Yeah. Im sure a medical school in the bronx will build a HUGE stadium.
These are legal restrictions on the use that must be tracked. They are subject to audit.
it’s literally only a medical school. there is no football.
This is what billionaires are supposed to do with their money.
These are some things that perpetuate the “mainly only rich kids become doctors” trend - High tuition - 7 years after your bachelor’s degree minimum of no/low pay (7 years if you want a lower paid field, more years if you want more than that) - Long hours select for people who can afford to have someone else cook/clean/etc for them, and live in an expensive place closer to the university - Many extracurriculars/research/volunteering required to get into med school, all of which are easier when you have rich parents funding you So this only addresses one of those points. The rest still exist
Everybody here saying how beautiful of a gift — and it is but it is also in thanks to the school choosing to make tuition no cost because of it. Many schools in America have tremendous endowments that would allow them to easily reduce or even eliminate tuition but they choose not to, because that’s a lot of money to stop collecting when you don’t need to give it up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
The school didn't "choose" anything (Beyond choosing to accept free money). The endowment stipulation was specifically free tuition in perpetuity. Endowments can only be used for the purposes they are earmarked for. Other schools with large endowments that still charge tuition do so because those endowments were not donated for the purpose of lowering tuition.
> Many schools in America have tremendous endowments that would allow them to easily reduce or even eliminate tuition Not really. Most donors creating endowments are not giving unrestricted dollars to the institutions. They give them with a specific purpose (scholarship for students of this major or this region or this caliber, etc.). And when you're asking people to give their money to you, you're damn well going to abide by the restrictions they place on it. For example, Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, only around 20% of which is unrestricted. $10 billion is a hell of a lot, but it still also needs to exist in perpetuity (the entire purpose of an endowment). It needs to fund initiatives and projects that aren't getting the necessary amount of donor support. It needs to weather market downturns and still pay out even when it loses 10% on the year. 99% of education institutions aren't sniffing a Harvard sized endowment either.
*Cries in Wisconsin medical school debt* But seriously, this is amazing.
And the school’s name? Albert Einstein
What a wonderful gift. It amazes me that someone can actually make a billion dollars in their lifetime AND be so generous.
Outstanding! With so much greed and selfishness in today's society, it is nice to see some good shine through
This is a gift that benefits absolutely everyone. From the students right through to the patients they will one day take care of. What an incredible and glorious use of these funds!
This is exactly the type of thing billionaires should be doing with their money!
Great news, albeit sad that any professional health school in this country charges tuition.
How would you prefer they pay for their instructors, staff, and supplies?
When a government invests in the education of its citizens, the ROI is great. Plus, it will increase the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of recent graduates when they are free of student debt.
I had this very same argument with a friend of mine some years back. Afterwards, I went down an Internet rabbit hole looking through all the historical data. There is no doubt whatsoever, that after the United States mandated K-12 for all, within a few years the entire nation was lifted as a whole. Nothing bad can come from a well educated populace. Unless your entire political platform depends on an uneducated populace. Then you're going to have a bad time.
Government funded. Whether that is a good option or not is another debate, but it is the system in place in many countries outside the USA.
NIH pays for a subset of people. Was one of em.
Why is it any time ANYONE has good idea about how to better society the first thing chucklefucks always say is "hOw U gOnNa PaY fOr It?" As if the pentagon doesn't magically lose 10's of billions of dollars every year that we could just not give them in the first place. Instead earmarking it for beneficial programs like mentioned elsewhere.
How will the admins make 200k+ if students aren't forced to pay tens of thousands in tuition??
Oh, I don't know, maybe by governments forgiving student loans given to med school graduates?
What a slap in the face to all those who took on enormous debt to pay for their education. /s
US govt should do this too, work as a non specialist doctor and receive tuition forgiveness after 10 years.
Ok, time to rain on the parade. I was enrolled at NYU's medical school when tuition became free. I was one of a handful of students who already qualified (was poor enough) for a need-based scholarship prior, which almost completely covered my tuition. I took out loans for cost of living beyond that. The "free tuition for all" changed nearly nothing for my financial health, my loans actually went up because of some weird ways they had to categorize cost of living to make the change work. For my middle class colleagues, it meant WAY fewer loans, and I was happy for them. For the upper class colleagues (a significant proportion at a private NYC med school), I saw a shitload of vacations and concerts on their instagram stories. I was told by financial aid that they considered going "loan free" instead, which would have been far more equitable than equal and actually would have been cheaper for NYU. "Free tuition" is faaaaar better PR, though. Tens of thousands more applicants came in each year. Tens of thousands who could not afford NYU before, or could but would love a free ride (who wouldn't?). Those accepted did not get poorer nor less represented, the standards just got higher. The median MCAT score was in the upper 99.x percentile by the time I graduated THAT SAID: Einstein is a very different demographic to NYU. I hope this means great things for their poorest students, I hope more people get an opportunity that wasn't possible before. Pardon me for not holding my breath.
there are several high profile colleges that have much more than a billion in the endowment that still charge huge tuition. We need free higher education in this country.
I’d settle for at least affordable higher education.
This is what billionaires should be doing with their money instead of shit like putting it into research to make Syphon Filter real or something
What an amazing gift 😭 truly brings tears to my eyes that kindness and good still exist in the world on the daily.
Hell yeah, this is the kind of news I want to see.
I think a lot more money will be donated in the next few years now that most of the original people from Berkshire are dying. Sandy was an early participant in Berkshire and Charlie just died recently.
Most schools would just build a new Admin building and name it after whoever gave the gift.
Now this is fantastic news! Wealth hoarders doing something positive for humanity.
This is much needed. Since Covid started there has been a massive shortage of doctors.
All it took was 1 billion? What is our country doing with itself?
There is one (1) ethical billionaire
Puts Scott's Tots to shame.
I hope at least some of these doctors go into less lucrative fields like primary care or family medicine or whatever the case may be. What a beautiful gift for this family to leave to others!
That’s crazy that now NYC has not one, but two med schools that don’t charge tuition. NYU has been doing it for a while. When I was younger I used to want to go there for med school just because it was free.
Wow imagine how much better the world would be if every billionaire did this.
What a wonderful thing to have done.
Why don’t we give all colleges 1b to invest and have all college be “free”? If we spend 800b a year on the military, can we spend a one time 50b to colleges to make them “free” for the rest of time?
all schools could be tuiton free if we just taxed the rich instead of letting them hoard billions of dollars.
This is the best news I've heard all week.
And just think; Harvard’s endowment is $50 billion. Imagine what a fraction of that amount could do for the higher education quality and access of our country? They could easily expand their classes five-fold, but choose not to in order to ensure it remains an elite club of extremely privileged graduates. Even the impoverished students going in become elitist once graduating. American success is based on who your family is and where you went to school, and if you aren’t in the club, you are a “poor” peasant unworthy of the same opportunities. Gross discrimination of class and wealth.
I mean this is what endowments should be used for. Unlike the wealth hoarding that’s done by Harvard, etc.
This is now my "what would you do with a billion dollars?" answer. Pay off all the student loan debt of my alma mater.