BALTIMORE — Johns Hopkins University's medical school will now be free for most students, thanks to a $1 billion gift from business mogul Michael Bloomberg to his alma mater.
Bloomberg previously also gave $1.8 billion gift to JHU in 2018 - the biggest gift in the university's history, which went toward undergraduate financial aid.
This new gift means that, starting this fall, medical students whose families make less than $300,000 (which is 95 percent of all Americans) will get free tuition, announced the university today.
For students whose families earn up to $175,000, the university will also cover room and board.
Bloomberg said in a statement:
As the U.S. struggles to recover from a disturbing decline in life expectancy, our country faces a serious shortage of doctors, nurses, and public health professionals—and yet, the high cost of medical, nursing, and graduate school too often bars students from enrolling. By reducing the financial barriers to these essential fields, we can free more students to pursue careers they’re passionate about—and enable them to serve more of the families and communities who need them the most.
Bloomberg's gift echoes another $1 billion gift earlier this year from a former faculty member to eliminate medical-school debt at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
JHU says undergraduate students from low-income backgrounds or who are the first in their family to go to college has grown by 43 percent since the 2018 Bloomberg gift.
Almost a third of Hopkins undergraduates are the first in their family to attend college.
Bloomberg graduated from the university in 1964, and has been very involved in the university in recent years.
He also gave JHU $300 million in 2016 to develop the American Health Initiative, and gave $150 million in 2021 to cover six years of tuition for students coming from historically black colleges and universities to pursue STEM careers.
Beginning next month, Stefano Montalvo will begin his tuition free med school journey at Johns Hopkins.
"I'm really excited for even future years because we're gonna get even more (people). The best and the brightest and give opportunity for those students free of debt and alleviate that financial burden that a lot of people face when deciding on medical school," says Stefano Montalvo, a Johns Hopkins med school students class of '28
According to Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels, this donation will increase access to medical students and students from other fields including health professionals, public health, school of nursing and other parts of the university.
"That's approximately 2/3 of the class currently who will be eligible for that level of assistance, meaning they'll go to medical school tuition free," says Daniels.
He says this donation is a win for the medical field because it helps bring in people who have let finances detour them from being in the field.
"What the gift does is, to enhance the ability of students to choose the careers that they are most passionate about, and more than that, to choose the places that they want to pursue those careers," says Daniels.
This is Bloomberg's second donation to Hopkins and Montalvo has benefited from them both. First, he benefited as an undergrad and now as a med school student.
Now that the news is out, Montalvo is excited for his peers who have been burdened by the financial stressors that come with attending med school.
"Financial stresses is one of the hardest stressors to overcome. It's something that's constant on your mind. It affects a lot of the decisions; you making your day-to-day life in terms of how you're living. To release that stress and give students peace of mind, it feels incredible," says Montalvo.
He says less stress will make them happier and the happier students are, the better they'll be.
Montalvo also feels this donation will make for a more diverse doctor-patient experience down the road.
"It's not diversity for diversity sake. It's diversity that adds new perspective. New life experiences. When you add all of those in the same classroom, we can correct misconceptions that exist throughout certain groups. We can correct judgments and be aware of our biases towards certain groups, certain types of people certain situations," says Montalvo.
"We will be a class of physicians that mirror the patients we're saying more than previous generations of physicians and that's something i'm really proud of a part of," says Montalvo.
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