Most medical students at Johns Hopkins University will no longer pay tuition thanks to a $1 billion gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies announced Monday.
Starting in the fall, the donation will cover full tuition for medical students from families earning less than $300,000. Living expenses and fees will be covered for students from families who earn up to $175,000.
Uplifting: this is objectively a ton of good done for these students
Dystopian: this money was earned by the theft of value produced by working class labor and throwing a few breadcrumbs of it back into the system and acting like it’s some great pure good is pure evil and people will lap it up like dogs
Yeah. Bloomberg and the other billionaires should be taxed enough so that we can fund this and other social programs for everyone.
Yes I hate it when the ultra rich decide to create a handful of “winners” leaving 99.9% of us still fucked. Will this make my future healthcare more affordable? Nope it just makes a small number of doctors wealthier.
No, it will the lives better for 2/3 of students. I can’t see how this is bad in anyway. Why would it be bad to make education free for some of the best future medical professionals.
Right? It’s almost like free education is good for society
Medical education could have been free this whole time through taxes but instead public funding of secondary education was gutted instead of expanded so rich fucks like Bloomburg could keep more money for themselves.
So even worse!
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Even more negative outlook:
The world is dying and fascism is rising and you spend a billion dollars on doctors not graduating with debt? They’re guaranteed quality employment! It’s the goddamn Dark Ages residency workload that depresses them!
Yup. Every time there’s a feel-good story like, “a corporate donor spent $20,000 so a dozen orphans didn’t have to be fed into the Orphan Crushing Machine” the media never questions why the Orphan Crushing Machine needs to exist in the first place.
Rich people like to talk about philanthropy and charity being very good, and sometimes they speak as though the act of giving is virtuous and transformative for the person doing the giving. I agree with that, at least, but I think it’s pretty fucked up that they perpetuate systems that both enable and require acts of charity. Kindness and charity would still necessary and good in a more equal world, but more people would have access to it if there were less wealth hoarding.
Seriously, is a single billion all it takes? There’s a dozen assholes in America alone who could do this for a dozen colleges each, and not even notice.
I knew Lemmy could spin this into a negative. I was counting on it actually. The most cynical message board hands down.
True, we should instead just celebrate this small one-off victory and forget the systemic issues that plague us. As long as the billionaires throw us a rare bone, we can leave the guillotines at home ig.
You mean we cannot selebrate the small victories and continue working for more.
Don’t be such a sith.
…so exactly like the top comment Thorny_Insight was responding to?
Nice strawman you got there. Is that binary?
Not a strawman. The comment you responded to originally acknowledged both the positive and negative sides of this. Meanwhile, you commented only on the negative side as if we aren’t allowed to acknowledge it. I called you out based entirely on the words you chose to use.
If this isn’t wasn’t what you intended to communicate, then I recommend you revise your former comment.