NYU’s Free Medical School Tuition Sparks Debate

NYU’s Announcement

NYU made the surprise announcement at the at the end of its annual White Coat Ceremony, where every new student is presented with a white lab coat to mark the beginning of their medical education and training. The announcement affected 442 currently enrolled students, including the 102 new students beginning their education this fall.

In its press release to mark the occasion, NYU said that its initiative was an effort to “simultaneously address the rising costs of medical education and still attract the best and brightest students to careers in medicine.” The school noted that overwhelming student debt has caused many medical school graduates to choose higher-paid specialties, which leaves less talented candidates to pursue careers in the less lucrative specialties like primary care, pediatrics, and gynecology. According to recent surveys, primary care physicians earn an average of $217,000, while orthopedic surgeons average $538,000 per year.

Kenneth G. Langone, chair of the Board of Trustees of NYU Langone Health said, “Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of our trustees, alumni, and friends, our hope—and expectation—is that by making medical school accessible to a broader range of applicants, we will be a catalyst for transforming medical education nationwide.”

Robert I. Grossman, M.D., the Saul J. Farber Dean of NYU School of Medicine and CEO of NYU Langone Health, explained, “This decision recognizes a moral imperative that must be addressed, as institutions place an increasing debt burden on young people who aspire to become physicians.” He continued, “A population as diverse as ours is best served by doctors from all walks of life, we believe, and aspiring physicians and surgeons should not be prevented from pursuing a career in medicine because of the prospect of overwhelming financial debt.”

NYU will need $600 million to fund this initiative—$450 million has already been raised.

Response to NYU’s Free Tuition Plan

NYU’s announcement was met with mixed reviews. Since the announcement, economic experts and commentators have questioned whether free tuition is the best solution to our nation’s rising student debt problem.

Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D., an economist, physician, and professor at Harvard Medical School, opined in Bloomberg, “Making medical education free for all students, then, may not be the soundest economic approach—at least from this perspective. A better tactic would be to expand means-testing beyond what medical schools already offer: to prioritize tuition coverage for applicants with low parental income, to waive their application fees, to pay travel expenses for medical school interviews, and to increase research and clinical opportunities for high-school and college students who fall in this demographic. Simply applying to medical school can cost upward of $10,000 per applicant, and relief here would yield large returns.”

Jena commented that the most likely result of NYU offering free medical school tuition is better recruitment. He noted that many of his own students have declined admissions to top-ranked schools in favor of lower-ranked school that offered them full scholarships.

Meanwhile, Deborah Sweeney, a columnist for Forbes, questioned if a tuition-free education would truly allow for a more diverse student body and whether student loan debt had an impact on which areas that physicians choose to practice. Sweeney noted that the data on this is mixed, “While some physicians may cite debt as a consideration when choosing family practice, for example, there is also ample evidence that family practitioners may take into consideration other factors—work/life balance, a desire to work in family practice, strong salaries in family practice—when making the final decision in their area of practice. It doesn’t appear that decreasing costs, or lower debt, would necessarily result in students choosing different practice areas, which was the espoused goal of the free tuition program at NYU.”