Medical school at Johns Hopkins University will be free now for most students, following a $1 billion gift from billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Starting in fall 2024, Hopkins will offer free tuition for students pursuing a medical degree who come from families earning less than $300,000 — a group that represents 95% of all Americans, the university said in a news release Monday.
For students coming from families that earn up to $175,000 — a threshold that still includes the vast majority of families in the country — Hopkins will cover living expenses, such as rent, on top of tuition and fees, the university said.
The philanthropic organization’s gift also will allow the school to expand financial aid opportunities for graduate students studying nursing, public health and other subjects.
Bloomberg’s $1 billion donation will be added to the university’s endowment, meaning the funds have been designated “in perpetuity” for supporting health education at the school, Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels said during a call with journalists on Monday afternoon.
“This is not a one and done gift,” Daniels said. “This gift has been made in the expectation that it is providing access today, tomorrow and indeed forever to the students targeted in this program.”
Johns Hopkins University’s endowment was about $10.5 billion in fiscal year 2023, according to reporting earlier this year from industry news outlet Higher Ed Dive.
Before Monday’s public announcement of Bloomberg’s donation, Daniels and his colleagues had been speaking with the billionaire for several months about the prospect of such a gift. Under the new scholarship formula established by Bloomberg’s donation, nearly two-thirds of current or incoming medical students at the university will attend tuition free and 45% of students will receive support for their living expenses in addition to free tuition, Daniels said.
Eligible new and returning students will receive updated aid packages this summer that reflect Bloomberg’s donation.
Medical schools remain dominated by students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. And while there have been some gains in the racial and ethnic diversity of people attending U.S. medical schools, Black Americans and those who are Hispanic or Latino remain under-represented. Progress also may be endangered by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last summer to end race-conscious, “affirmative action” admission programs at colleges and universities across the country.
But the historic gift, announced Monday morning by Bloomberg — a 1964 Hopkins graduate, former New York mayor and founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies — will ensure that talented aspiring doctors from a broad range of socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds have the opportunity to graduate debt-free from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and that students from most American families will pay nothing at all.
“As the U.S. struggles to recover from a disturbing decline in life expectancy, our country faces a serious shortage of doctors, nurses, and public health professionals—and yet, the high cost of medical, nursing, and graduate school too often bars students from enrolling,” Bloomberg said in the university’s news release. “By reducing the financial barriers to these essential fields, we can free more students to pursue careers they’re passionate about—and enable them to serve more of the families and communities who need them the most.”
This isn’t the first time Bloomberg donated big money to his alma mater. In 2001, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was renamed in his honor, after he contributed more than $100 million to the university. More recently, in 2018, Bloomberg committed $1.8 billion to support undergraduate financial aid — at the time, the largest-ever single contribution to a U.S. college or university.
That gift dramatically expanded the amount of scholarships offered by the university and, as a result, transformed the makeup of its undergraduate population. The number of undergraduate students entering Hopkins from low-income backgrounds and/or who are the first in their families to attend college has increased by 43% since 2018, according to Monday’s news release. Today, these students make up nearly a third of Hopkins’ undergraduates, surpassing most Ivy League and Ivy League-adjacent schools.
“Extraordinary talent exists in every community across America, a fact borne out by the transformative impact of Mike Bloomberg’s historic gift for financial aid to Hopkins undergraduates six years ago that dramatically expanded the breadth of experience and accomplishment of our student body,” Daniels said in Monday’s news release. “Removing financial barriers to individual opportunity fuels excellence, innovation, and discoveries that redound to the benefit of society.”
Bloomberg’s most recent donation will build upon the School of Medicine’s student debt-reduction initiative, which started in 2020 with support from billionaires Joanne and Bill Conway and Kim and Jim Davis, as well as alumni and other donors. Last academic year, the average student loan debt for Hopkins medical school graduates was about $105,000 — roughly half the national average, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
For students who graduated from U.S. medical schools in 2023, roughly 70% had education debt — the median being $200,000, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Gene Ransom, CEO of the Maryland State Medical Society, said he knows plenty of medical school graduates with upward of $300,000 in debt, from their combined undergraduate and graduate educations.
“They come out of school with like a mortgage payment before they even have gotten their first job,” said Ransom, noting that resident physicians make around $60,000 to $70,000 while they complete their post-graduate training.
“It almost becomes like a chain around your neck,” he said of student debt.
How much debt a young doctor has to pay off could influence the type of medicine they practice and where they practice, Daniels said. While there is an overall shortage of physicians nationwide, that shortage is especially acute for primary care doctors — a field of medicine that often pays less than surgical specialties such as neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery.
“We see this gift as very empowering of students within the program to do the things that they think will be most impactful, most satisfying to them — but ultimately, we hope, most impactful on patient populations in need throughout the country,” Daniels said.
Stefano Montalvo knows firsthand how an unexpected scholarship can change someone’s life. When he applied to Hopkins in 2018, he said, he had accepted that if he got in, he likely would graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. But because of Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion contribution to Hopkins’ undergraduate program, he was able to graduate debt-free from the university in 2023 with degrees in Spanish and neuroscience.
This fall, Montalvo is headed to medical school at Hopkins. He already had been promised a full-ride from the university before Bloomberg announced his gift, but he celebrated it Monday, nonetheless.
“My classmates are going to benefit from this,” he said, “and kids like myself in future classes are going to get to pursue the very best of education with this gift, without fearing for the financial burden they’d have to take on.”
Besides supporting students at the School of Medicine, the $1 billion endowment will expand graduate financial aid for students at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Nursing, as well as those pursuing graduate degrees in the Hopkins schools of education, engineering, business, arts and sciences, and advanced international studies.
The donation also will increase financial aid for the Peabody Institute and the new School of Government and Policy, and will support the development of a new program aiming to draw “impact-focused interdisciplinary leaders into the worlds of research, industry, and government through innovations in PhD education and training,” the university said.
Earlier this year, New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine announced students would no longer pay tuition, following a $1 billion gift from Ruth Gottesman, the chair of the college’s board of trustees and wife of the late David Gottesman, a business partner of Warren Buffett. Gottesman was a 1948 graduate of the Friends School of Baltimore.
As positive as such donations are, said Ransom, “there’s not a Bloomberg to give a billion dollars to every med school in the country.”
Ransom, who also chairs the state loan repayment advisory committee, said he hopes the good news Monday highlights the need for more comprehensive solutions to making medical and nursing school more affordable.
“There has to be a way to fix this policy, rather than just hoping on the benevolence of others. That’s not the best way to solve social problems,” he said. “This is wonderful — don’t get me wrong — and it’s great for Hopkins, but we’ve got to figure something better out.”
