Live data from Hacker News

NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

wsj.com

51–60 of 531 posts

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#51
post #9
post #4

This is amazing. I graduated from medical school two years ago with $300,000 in debt. I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try a healthcare startup and/or pursue a research, but the risk is too great - I need the attending salary to pay off the debt.

If I may ask, how exactly do you have the time to be both a resident and a software developer? There aren't enough hours in the day. Do you even sleep?

I did a prelim-surgery intern year. The hours are worse than medicine, but there are way less "mandatory" activities (no lectures, no endless rounding, etc.). For the most part, you're on the floor waiting for pages. I used the time between pages to write code.

Now I'm a radiology resident and have much more time.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#52
post #22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask, how exactly do you have the time to be both a resident and a software developer? There aren't enough hours in the day. Do you even sleep?

There is time for life outside of residency. My wife started residency with a 5 month old and had another child half way through, this delayed her graduation a total of 4 weeks.

I have outmost respect for this type of dedication. Amazing!

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#54
post #39
post #21

But who is going to pay off that $450 million ?

Not sure about the down votes, I didn't mean to ask a rhetorical question. But someone has to pay if not students. Or is that not how it works in this case? Disclaimer: I couldn't read the whole article because I don't have a login to the website.

Donations.

And if you don’t mind going through Facebook (no login required)

https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/nyu-offers-full-tuition-sch...

On a meta level. Can you really be accused of not RTFM if it’s behind a paywall - that doesn’t seem fair.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#55
post #21

But who is going to pay off that $450 million ?

As another user commented, the total cost per year is around ~$34 million which is roughly 5% of the total $600 million they're looking to raise. That 600 million will be invested to target some annual return and as long as that return is expected to be a couple of percentage points over 5% (which is not an unreasonable expectation) then they should be able to more than cover the cost every year, without even touching the principal amount. Looks like they're raising the total amount via donations

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus anything that can be done to juice the supply side of the healthcare curve is a big benefit. Cheaper school means more doctors means lower labor costs means cheaper healthcare.

Cheaper medical school tuition isn't going to lead to more doctors. The limiting factor is the number of available seats and residency positions, not the cost.

> Cheaper medical school tuition isn't going to lead to more doctors. The limiting factor is the number of available seats and residency positions, not the cost.

Bingo. Also, even if we somehow forced all doctors to work for free and magically ended up with the same quality of care, we'd still only reduce total spending by about 7%.

That's a hard upper bound on the effects that increasing the supply of physicians can have.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#58
post #31

How do they have the money to do this, sustainably?

Maybe they purchased real estate in NYC and are charging companies to rent space there. Historically that's how the Cooper Union has been tuition free (since they own the space under the Chrysler Building) [0].

[0] https://wernercohn.com/Chrysler.html

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#60
post #33
post #31

How do they have the money to do this, sustainably?

By creating a giant endowment that can be used to generate cash. In this case, $600 million lump sum.

While I’m glad that billionaires are donating, why should colleges be dependent on the largess of private benefactors to ensure that our healthcare system is sustainable?
Post reply on HN