Billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s $1 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University will make medical school tuition free for most students and increase scholarships for students enrolled in nursing, public health and other graduate programs.
In a letter published Monday in the Bloomberg Foundation’s annual report, Bloomberg cited the twin challenges of declining health and education. The donation is a powerful endorsement of the value of higher education at a time when academia is increasingly under political attack.
“As America struggles to recover from a severe decline in life expectancy, our nation faces a serious shortage of doctors, nurses and public health professionals. Yet the high cost of medical, nursing and graduate school too often prevents students from enrolling,” wrote Bloomberg, a 1964 graduate of Johns Hopkins University and founder of business and financial data news company Bloomberg. “Reducing financial barriers to these critical fields will enable more students to pursue careers they’re passionate about, allowing them to better serve the families and communities that need them most.”
Johns Hopkins University announced that starting this fall, it will offer free tuition to medical students whose families earn less than $300,000 a year, a four-year program that typically costs about $65,000 a year.
Living expenses and tuition fees are also provided to students from families earning less than $175,000 a year.
“This is a full scholarship,” said Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels, “and we think this is a very significant step in making a medical education available to the best and brightest people across the nation.”
Holly J. Humphrey, president of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on improving education for health professionals, said medical school tuition rates are rising faster than the rate of inflation at both public and private schools, and there has been a shift in the type of students enrolled, with a growing share of students from higher-income families and a decline in the number of students from lower-income families.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the average medical school debt for students entering in 2023 was $200,000.
Sanjay Desai, chief academic officer at the American Medical Association, said too many students don’t even consider medical school because of the cost.
Health outcomes improve when doctors reflect the diversity of the patients they treat, he said, and studies have also shown that students from low-income backgrounds are more likely to return as doctors to underserved areas.
There are other troubling gaps: The country needs more primary care doctors, but student loan debt can drive people into more lucrative specialties, Desai said.
“Hopefully this will inspire others to take action,” said Desai, who is also on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University.
The gift brings the Bloomberg Foundation’s total endowment to Johns Hopkins to a staggering $4.55 billion, and the infusion of capital has allowed the university to exponentially increase its ambition and impact in many areas. Affordable tuition is a key pillar of the foundation’s mission statement. In 2018, former New York City mayor and presidential candidate Bloomberg announced a historic $1.8 billion gift to increase financial aid for undergraduates and promise to make future admissions decisions independent of financial means. The gift has helped change the student body, which now includes more low-income students and is more racially diverse.
Stefano Montalvo was one of the beneficiaries of the donation in 2018. He never thought he’d be able to attend college, but when he snuck out of track practice at his rural New Jersey public high school to check if he’d been accepted to Hopkins, he was surprised to see a scholarship offer that covered nearly the entire cost of attending the school.
“I called my mom,” he said, “and we both cried on the phone.”
When he started medical school at Hopkins in the fall, he expected to take on $400,000 in debt. But he found out his tuition and living expenses would be covered, and on Monday, he found out many of his classmates would, too. “It’s just unbelievable,” he said.
The aid is important in giving hope to low-income people, he said, and “keeping these students in school is essential to the advancement of medicine and healthcare.”
Most of the patients they treat are not well-off, so having students who experienced hardships growing up helps inform others about barriers to care and other issues, he said. “That kind of learning environment allows us to grow and produce physicians who are better prepared to deal with the diversity of today’s society,” he said.
The donation announced Monday isn’t the first aimed at making medical school tuition free. Earlier this year, New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine received a $1 billion gift from Ruth Gottesman, chair of the school’s board of trustees, which led the school to jubilantly announce it would refund tuition for the spring semester of the senior year and make it tuition-free in the future. NYU Grossman School of Medicine announced in 2018 that it would offer full tuition scholarships to all students, regardless of financial need, and a $200 million donation last summer ensured that NYU Grossman Long Island School of Medicine, NYU’s second medical school, would be tuition-free in perpetuity.
At Hopkins, existing aid has helped reduce the debt students carry: Last year’s graduates had an average of $105,000 in debt, about half the national average, university officials said.
Monday’s announcement will dramatically change that.
Part of the value of this model, Daniels says, is its simplicity: “Applicants, or potential applicants, don’t have to wait for an admissions offer or a scholarship package from the school and can get a clear idea of what the total cost will be based on their family income.”
The gift will also increase scholarships for graduate students in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Nursing, as well as in the schools of Humanities, International Studies, Education, Engineering, Business Administration, the Peabody Institute and the School of Government and Policy, which was announced last fall and will be located at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center near the Capitol in Washington.
Many students at Johns Hopkins University have benefited from scholarship donations. Growing up near Chicago, Albert Holler had always wanted to be a doctor, ever since a high school classmate died of leukemia. But with his mother working a variety of jobs, including as a hairdresser, waitress and cleaner, and his father working two jobs to support a family of five, he thought he would have to take on huge debts. After applying to medical schools, he woke up one weekend morning in his undergraduate dorm, still sleepy, when he opened an email from Hopkins University. The dean had offered him a $90,000-a-year scholarship, which also included living expenses for four years. Wondering if it was a real offer, Holler texted his father.
That gift from a donor “profoundly changed the course of my life,” he said.
He said covering medical school tuition for more students would not only help Hopkins attract the best students regardless of financial ability, but it would also be great for patient care.
Holler, who is doing his internal medicine residency in Baltimore and hopes to one day become an oncologist, frequently uses the Spanish he learned from his mother and honed while volunteering at the clinic. Baltimore has seen a recent influx of Central Americans, and Holler relies on Spanish to understand their needs. “It seems to help them take a deep breath and have a little more confidence,” Holler says.
