Donating money to make medical school free just make rich doctors richer; It's the worst use of philanthropic giving
You might as well just lobby for tax breaks for millionaires.
If you want to reform medical education finances, then the best thing to do is lower the rates charged for government backed student loans.
If you want medical school to have fairer admissions, and no longer prioritize the children of rich parents, you would follow the advice of Roland Frier and others and create a better pipeline with more encouragement to apply and free application strategy to high performing, low and middle income kids at state and community colleges.
But making medical school free is just a way to give more money to rich doctors who are going into ortho anyway.
Here is the latest headline and obligatory self congratulations.
Why is this a bad idea? First, even though medical school loans can be formidable, doctors make a lot of money.
Career lifetime earnings are massive despite loans, and higher than most other US laborers. MILLIONS.
There is no evidence that free medical school means that poor or minority kids are more likely to apply or be admitted.
There is no evidence that free medical school means students are more likely to do primary care or pediatrics and NYU’s experiment with that a few years ago basically shows they do not. Of course, it is rational to take the free education and do ortho anyway.
The NY times article contains a distraction
“Almost half of Einstein’s first-year medical students are New Yorkers, and nearly 60 percent are women. About 48 percent of current medical students at Einstein are white, 29 percent are Asian, 11 percent are Hispanic and 5 percent are Black.”
But here is the problem. It is the women, hispanics and blacks WHO DON’T GET INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL at EINSTEIN who would benefit from the investment. The ones that do get in are already guaranteed high career lifetime earnings.
Donating money for free medical school increases career lifetime earnings from 3 million to 3.4 million. Quite possible its the dumbest thing you could do with a billion dollars. The least effective altruism possible. You might as well argue for more tax loopholes for millionaires.
I much prefer free medical school (or loan forgiveness) to anyone who will go into primary care in an area of need: rural, urban, indigenous and agree to spend 5 years there. The barrier is not the cost of medical school (there is plenty of loan and scholarship available) it is finding and feeding the pipeline with scientifically gifted students of all backgrounds.
And what about the disproportionately high number of women medical students? Despite the public attention to “women’s health care”, men consistently have worse health outcomes than women. “According to the existing, extensive scientific evidence in the literature, men on average are living sicker and dying younger at a higher rate compared to women.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35701992/ If the disparities were adverse to women, does anyone question that the first solution would be more women doctors? Yet not only does academia and the media not give any attention to the drastic decrease in men attending medical school, they lionize the “progress” of women in medicine ignoring that it is now disproportionately high for women (and yet primary care continues to decline).