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.
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.
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Must be nice to have your taxes pay for something useful instead of guns and war like us.
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The US will keep paying to protect NATO countries so we can fight wars there instead of here.
Unless trump wins.
CIA hit incoming.
On who?
Well, Trump for fucking with NATO too much.
The US can’t afford it. Maybe if we cut government spending in half. They’re out of control and everyone is suffering because they’re destroying the value of the dollar. This issue (but not all) ready is a both sides problem.
Europe is a nuclear power with second strike capability. „Practically disarmed„ is rather different
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France has repeatedly tried to hand over shared control of those nukes to Germany. I’d argue that this alliance is set in stone.
Our military spending is not preventing us from having free college or free healthcare. Both would save us money if we switched to 100% government funded systems. No amount of military spending is preventing us from saving money.
Those can also be useful, the problem is we’re choosing not to do both.
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What’s useful about funding foreign wars, and coups?
War does drive a lot of scientific development.
I’m so glad we kill strangers then… you know, for science.
It used to be free in Australia but then after the politicians all got their free education they decided the country couldn’t afford it anymore.
To be fair the new system is still pretty reasonable but it used to be totally free.
Ahhh, boomers. They got their uni education for the price of a McChicken and still ended up as some of the dumbest and most selfish motherfuckers on the planet.
The original Hippocratic Oath made you swear not to charge to teach people about medicine.
It also made you promise not to do surgery and medical knowledge revolved around balancing bile.
It’s interesting to see the differences in the two:
https://doctors.practo.com/the-hippocratic-oath-the-original-and-revised-version/
The Oath was rewritten in 1964 by Dr. Louis Lasagna
I nearly died when I read Dr. Lasagna
He’s sort of a cheesy guy on the surface but he has layers.
Hypocritic Oath on the other hand…
With a billion dollars, I’d just buy enough congressman to make university free for everyone. They’re not even that expensive
He did try to buy an election already.
That’s where he fucked up, it’s so much cheaper to timeshare a politician that to be one.
True, true. Funny how it’s so much cheaper to own an elected official than it is to be one
It makes sense. They don’t want to share the pie. But will happily accept an extra slice.
It says starting in the fall it will be free, but how long does 1 billion last? How many years will they be able to do this for now?
Endowments aim to achieve perpetual existence by only spending dividends from investments. Assume growth of 8% of a billion means they can spend 80 million dollars a year without shrinking the endowment.
And that really highlights the absolute absurdity of billionaires existing at all
😃
The 4% rule can fail during some cycles, an 8% withdrawal would have numerous failure rates.
You’d have to be willing to adjust heavily during downturns, probably yearly. Adjusting like that could cause uncertainty and make it difficult to apply for all students.
3.5% over an extended period had no failures on any cycle.
The 3.5% was looking at very early retirement, such as 35/40yr old.
Edit: just want to add, those failures on the 4% were small. It was like if you started the cycle on 1 of 2 months many years ago and made no changes when shit got very bad, it would fail. The majority of the time you end up with vastly more money. But also past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance so who knows, but there is some risk.
The operating expenses will show a sudden and totally coincidental billion dollar increase in 2024, and tuition will be collected as usual in 2025.
That’s how getting the government into student loans worked out. It took longer than a semester, but it cost more money than free college and put so many people in so much crippling debt so that evens out.
Based on that, I expect that the costs will go up $750M and stay there so there will be one semester of free tuition, one of severely reduced tuition, then it will be so expensive that no one can go.
The Internet says that the total cost for a degree from Johns Hopkins medical student per year is $64,665. In addition, various indirect costs like books, housing, healthcare, various fees, living expenses, and so on, bring that same estimate up to around $105,000 annually.
$1,000,000,000 invested in a stupid boring index fund at an estimated 4% return yields $40,000,000 in interest alone, or, using the above numbers, enough for 380(.95) students each year.
Based on this quick page from their own website: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/som/education-programs/md-program/our-students/class-statistics
Wherein they accept just 266 students, it could last for a very long time.
Big doomer comment section
This is the fediverse, what do you expect? There will always be something to be complaining about here!
🤙 Mount up
I am choosing to only see the uplifting stuff here and rejecting the bad.
It’s insane making tuition free for medical students, who have the best chances of stable employment and increasing wage growth over the years after graduation. Make tuition free for humanities students instead
Edit: drs have lots of flexible income
Here’s some data though: https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/maryland/johns-hopkins-university/salaries/
Median US physician salary: https://physiciansthrive.com/physician-compensation/doctor-median-pay/
So this $1B gift to make med school free for people who wouldn’t have had issues paying it off sounds like tax cuts for the rich…
It should be free for everyone.
I get the hate, but as someone with some experience here, the amount of debt from a normal BA/BSc is miniscule compared to med school…like doesn’t even come remotely close. The amount of time spent paying that back for someone that doesn’t come from wealth is sometimes longer than they live…
Okay I hear you. I guess I was thinking of drs who end up making quarter mill usd 5-7 years after school. That kind of income isn’t guaranteed in any other profession, not even software engineering or law
Totally agree, it’s wild, just wanted to give some perspective from the other side 😊
I appreciate that, it’s always useful to know more
If you’re not making 200k as a doctor in America and it’s not a deliberate choice you actually should kill yourself.
/S
After all that school, I hear you 😅. But physicians in Canada, for instance, make substantially less than our friends to the south…for some specialties, even getting to $200,000 doesn’t mean much when you have so much debt, fees, and other business costs. It makes a difference given the huge need for physicians all around…such a sacrifice on so many levels with little payoff untill so much later. Couldn’t imagine the impact a donation like this would have anywhere, let alone Canada.
Yeah it should go to CS departments so we can make ad tech better🤡
So and so.
This could be a vehicle for a lot of people who don’t come from a great financial background and don’t want to take loans without knowing if they’ll even be able to graduate because they’d likely need to work through school, to get an education that lifts themselves and their families to a higher socioeconomic class.
