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Johns Hopkins medical school will be free for most after $1B donation
- beretguy 2y agoNice 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.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40905323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40905323
- hcfman 2y agoSuper nice! Let's turn this into a billionare challenge shall we? Do billionares also do the challenges thing?
- bamboozled 2y agoor 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".
- lenkite 2y agoThe extra tax will just go into the hands of U.S. military contractors. Not to medical student tuition.
- octopoc 2y agoYeah 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.
- wetpaws 2y ago[dead]
- az226 2y agoI’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.
- financltravsty 2y agoThe 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.
- az226 2y agoThe 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.
- paradox242 2y ago[flagged]
- hcfman 2y agoI challenge thee
- dtx1 2y agoTo be fair SpaceX is pretty impressive. Wether that's Musks doing can be argued somewhat but it's still fair to say he's been deeply involved
- scotty79 2y agoOnly when you compare it to nothing people already achieved half a century ago. SpaceX now I basically using taxpayer money to launch empty tubes one after another on suborbital trajectories in hopes that one day they could be used for private Starlink satellites and pretty much nothing else. Starship is Cybertruck. Watch what some competent people that are critical of Elon have to say and the completely different image emerges than what he tries to project with less and less success. More rooted in facts.
- dtx1 2y agoShow me a single rocket carrying any payload into orbit and land again afterwards that isn't made by SpaceX. I'll wait.
- timschmidt 2y agoNot only that, SpaceX has launched more mass to orbit than everyone else combined over the entire history of space launches. They are responsible for more than 80% of the world's mass to orbit last year. Starship is a full 2x - 3x the power of Saturn V, the previous largest rocket ever to reach orbit. Raptor operates with the highest chamber pressure of any rocket engine that's ever flown. SpaceX operates the largest constellation of satellites in the world - more than all others combined. The list of records goes on. It's really nuts. Wild that people think a cult of personality or even billions of dollars can accomplish all that. Not without serious engineering chops to back it up.
- kennethwolters 2y agotuition-free for how long? current class? Forever?
- Detrytus 2y agoUntil $1B runs out? Tuition is like $70k per year, so $1B should be enough to cover 3300 students for four years.
- swores 2y agoUniversity 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40925597
- kwkelly 2y agoThis 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.
- unholythree 2y agoI 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.
- delfinom 2y agoMedical student enrollment is controlled by quota dictated by the AMA cartel.
- jgalt212 2y agoOr double enrollment at JHU.
- throwaway4u 2y agoYou 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'.
- tengbretson 2y agoFortunately though, Hopkins already exists.
- itishappy 2y agoWaiving tuition won't increase the number of doctors. Adding slots for students would, but that would likely also effect the quality of education.
- notjulianjaynes 2y agoThat 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.
- cbsks 2y agoIt’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-attendance/making-mit-affordable/ 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?
- RationPhantoms 2y agoMost ivy leagues have a minimum family salary threshold for charging tuition; Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc.
- cbsks 2y agoLooks like Yale is 75k https://finaid.yale.edu/costs-affordability/affordability 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 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-Presentation-2024.pdf https://financialaid.stanford.edu/pdf/AW-Finances-Presentati... Seems like those universities, with their huge endowments, could be doing more..