Johns Hopkins medical school will be free for most after $1B donation | Hacker News Reader

Johns Hopkins medical school will be free for most after $1B donation

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104 pointsjnord58 comments

It’s for families making less than 300k. MIT has full scholarships for families making less than 140k https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

Besides the 2 other medical schools mentioned in the article, what other universities have similar scholarships?

Most ivy leagues have a minimum family salary threshold for charging tuition; Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc.

Looks like Yale is 75k https://finaid.yale.edu/costs-affordability/affordability.

Harvard is 85k, but students still need a job https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works

Stanford is 100k, but students still need a job https://financialaid.stanford.edu/pdf/AW-Finances-Presentati...

Seems like those universities, with their huge endowments, could be doing more..

Aren't these students the ideal borrowers for student loans? The endowment can likely be invested elsewhere for greater profit.

The point is to look less elitist.

Pretty sure these are definitively non-profit organizations.

non-profits invest in profit-making ventures.

True for most every school not just ivys

Maybe private universities, but certainly not the public university I went to. People with low incomes financed their education with loans, not scholarships.

The only other option is Pell for federal aid.

Luckily my state used to offer 100% tuition for B/3.0+ students. They still offer up to 100% with 2 scholarships but the main scholarship is not 100% anymore. It’s funded by the lottery.

Either way it doesn’t include room and board. A job is necessary to live but not for the scholarship.

Man, if only this was true!

Stanford isn't an ivy league school.

I wonder if a better use would be to establish a new medical school at a university without one. It seems like if society has too few doctors we need additional medical student spots more than a reduction in medical student debt.

Or double enrollment at JHU.

You could take that money and open another medical school, and you may well get a pretty good medical school, but you probably won't get one nearly as good as Hopkins'.

Fortunately though, Hopkins already exists.

Waiving tuition won't increase the number of doctors. Adding slots for students would, but that would likely also effect the quality of education.

That seems fine to me. While it sounds nice, I am skeptical this donation will do much in terms of more equitable access to higher education, precisely because John Hopkins is one of the best med schools around. To get in you already need to be privileged or exceptional and probably both. I'd love to know how many people ever have been accepted into Johns Hopkins and declined to go exclusively because of the cost of tuition; I'd be surprised if it's even like 0.5% of students.

Meanwhile, you don't need to be a genius to better yourself.

Or give the money to a more “working class” med school that trains regular doctors to work in regular practices and hospitals.

Hopkins is the elite - those doctors are going to be the best of the best, and they’re going to be well connected and compensated regardless of where they started.

Too few doctors thing is problem with different bottlenecks... Mainly being that the US Residency program is funded by the gov't, and is competitive to get into. Many of the lesser schools and especially DO or carribean schools have graduates who are not able to get into residency on first try because there are not enough slots.

Medical student enrollment is controlled by quota dictated by the AMA cartel.

Super nice! Let's turn this into a billionare challenge shall we? Do billionares also do the challenges thing?

or just tax them properly and make everything better, obviously we have to make sure the money is well spent, but I don't see why we should be relying on billionaire handouts, even though it's "nice of them to give something back to the entire society that created their wealth".

Yeah the problem with these handouts is that the kind of people who become billionaires tend to be:

1) a bit disconnected from the real problems in society

2) convinced that their success in one field translates well to fixing society

3) very aware of the need for good PR

Which means that their affect always looks good but there's usually a hidden agenda which is orthogonal to society's best interest.

I’ve thought about this. What if we gave billionaires the option (marginal tax rates for capital gains), where they are either paying any taxes above $XM as either taxes or as donations to a list of eligible non-profits. Basically “forced” giving pledge.

The problem is non-profits are not optimal vehicles for societal change. And indiscriminately throwing a large lump sum at organizations that haven't grown to be accustomed to managing themselves in that sort of environment can have deleterious knock-on effects.

A very crude and reductionist example is donating to a clothing center (that is basically a tax write-off vehicle for HNWI) that then dumps those clothes into foreign countries destroying their local economies.

It is such a hard problem, and I have yet to see any brilliant leadership in this area. Off the top of my head, American libraries are the most recent effort that I would consider to have been led well.

The word eligible is doing heavy lifting in my comment.

The government can look into and qualify top tier non-profits like the Gates Foundation, St. Jude, YMCA, etc.

The extra tax will just go into the hands of U.S. military contractors. Not to medical student tuition.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40905323

Nice to see. I guess this is the “trickle down” of capitalism that “they were talking about”. Stuff like this needs to happen more often.

I bet Musk has a few dollars to spare on something like this instead of laundering money through his Mars colonization project.

tuition-free for how long? current class? Forever?

Until $1B runs out? Tuition is like $70k per year, so $1B should be enough to cover 3300 students for four years.

University endowments are usually used the way kwkelly has (since you commented) explained [*] - investing it and using the returns, rather than burning through the capital until it's all gone. It would be extremely surprising in this case if they chose to do it the way you're thinking.

[*] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40925597

This would probably last forever. The MD class size is only around 120 people and at 70k per year tuition costs would be 8.4M per year (ignoring that only families earning under 300k are eligible). Modest interest on 1B would easily earn over 10M per year and probably several times that. Hedge funds often manage these endowment funds.

Only until some clever people figure out how to attach themselves to the money and suck the whole thing dry in few years.

Ah the essence of capitalism. Leeching middle men

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