This is awesome! So many medical students are kinda forced into more profitable healthcare practices than ones which people need more desperately (e.g. plastic surgery vs rheumatology).
I especially love that this was done with private fundraising over government funding. Philanthropy can be effective, often far more so than governments!
I predict this will have the opposite effect. This will increase the appeal of NYU leading to stronger students applying/accepting offers of admission who go on to get into higher paying specialties.
It's a bit similar to the test-optional trend in undergraduate admissions. The acceptance count (numerator) generally remains constant, while the application count (denominator) increases as more students see the appeal of omitted test scores. So, the acceptance rate decreases, which can craft a façade of prestige, among other things. Additionally, that increased applicant pool may include some higher-achieving students, likely applying for safety purposes, which can increase prestige if they accept; furthermore, their acceptance pushes otherwise-capable students to a lower priority in the pool.
All in all, in order to effectively analyze these occurrences (particularly in admissions), one must ask: how will the institution benefit? They wouldn't pass these changes otherwise.
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.
> Cheaper medical school tuition isn't going to lead to more doctors.
No, but it might mean more doctors in the kind of practices and specialties that are socially useful but not serving the wealthiest of private pay clients, because the necessity of chasing the maximum returns is reduced.
I would hardly say it shows the effectiveness of philanthropy - this is just one college and has very limited effects on the healthcare system as a whole. In Germany for instance higher education is free everywhere, I don't see how this could work with private fundraising.
As an European I always find the dichotomy "government vs people" strange. If the state pays for something, it's solidarity, not communism.
>In Germany for instance higher education is free everywhere, I don't see how this could work with private fundraising.
Germany isn't a good example. Germany stands because it can exploit its weaker neighbors, the east block out of their resources and force the companies to book profit and get taxed in Germany.
Germans see each others as bothers. Show me a few German companies where a foreigner is in the executive role?
The whole point of Germany is Germans first. Ofcourse, they can make education free in this setting.
I especially love that this was done with private fundraising over government funding. Philanthropy can be effective, often far more so than governments!