Tuition-Free Medical School: Winners & Losers Edition

If anyone knows a Billionaire that wants to donate to a DO school. I can hook him up

Snarky Sheriff of Sodium is a welcome distraction from STEP 2 dedicated

Thanks for your perspective. I agree there should be a better push to donate scholarships or grants designed for aspiring medical students to alleviate financial burdens. These funds could cover MCAT prep courses, research expenses, and clinical experiences. Sadly, many students shy away from or are encouraged to focus on something other than the premed track because of the time and expense needed to be a competitive medical school applicant, regardless of the school or specialty interest.

Wake up babe, new Sheriff of Sodium just dropped

Can you please make the video on old NBME exams and how we went from a comprehensive test to just mcq based test

Great video as always, the part where you mention the egalitarian streak in medicine really hits home. The rising cost of colleges, competitive fever for all metrics, the cost people spend on MCAT and MCAT prep, and the increasing difference between low and high-tier schools seem to be strongly stratifying applicants and then future physicians. Anecdotal but I help premed students all the time with applications and this whole process is getting more opaque, more costly, and way easier to mess up without realizing, especially among people who start in more disadvantageous positions.

I would like to bring up another demographic in the “rich kids” section, that being people with affluent families who are NOT having their education covered by their family.

While this is circumstantial, I know more people than not whose families make >300k, but are still taking out their own loans for medical education. I think most analyses of who will be affected by these changes focus on the minority of these students whose expenses are covered by their families, rather than the larger cohort who are still taking out loans. A free education is still a massive change for students in this circumstance.

Great analysis as always.

Only thing that scares me the most is that medical school will matter now and as IMG I am already at disadvantage. So I hope I get match in internal medicine 🥺🥺

I agree with what you said about tuition free and speciality selection. I was given a full tuition scholarship at my medical school but had to choose a primary speciality (FM, IM, PEDS, OBGYN). The parameters of the scholarship recently changed and studies no longer have to commit to primary care. My next move was to start building my CV for Radiation Oncology or potentially Vascular Surgery.

Good analysis. Programs like CUNY School of Med Bs/MD do much more to improve access to medical education. Still... the focus then turns to equal access to quality K-12 public school education to be college-ready (and competitive for a low cost BS MD).

The only way to make primary care a more desirable specialty is to increase the reimbursement of active attending PCPs. Little to nobody who goes into medical school wants to go into primary care, this is usually something they end up opting to because other more competitive specialties become unachievable. This is especially true for any top 20 medical school where pretty much everyone wants to specialize and has means/connections to do so. This was true for NYU and this will be true for Hopkins. But increasing PCP reimbursements probably won’t help either because it’s more of a distribution of physicians issue. I just don’t think this is something that you can fix at the medical school level.

Great analysis, especially the part on billionaires. I think the overarching theme that needs to be addressed more is that we live in a broken economic system where you have to get lucky that a billionaire (who usually accumulated their wealth through dubious means) decides to donate to your school. There has to be a better distribution system than relying on the whims of a billionaire taking pity on your existence.

Great conversation and insights, as always! I find that among my medical school classmates, those who go into primary care truly had a passion for it from the start of medical school, and never thought much about the money. Those folks are unlikely to be swayed by free tuition, which is honestly more of a minor financial strain over the course of a specialist physician’s lifetime earnings. If you’re really interested in money, you’d be much better off going to the most expensive medical school if it helps you match Derm or Neurosurgery, and the subsequent career earning difference would far outweigh the relatively minor savings of free medical school.

On the whole though, I still think that primary care specialties would improve their recruitment with improved salaries and valuation in the healthcare system, which currently tends to deprioritize primary care investments in favor of lucrative ambulatory surgical centers or infusion centers.

Love your content but very disappointed you chose to perpetuate the myth that Billionaires only pay 1%. Per the IRS, the top .1% of earners paid 25.6%.

Man I like your videos but you should steer away from politics, it just alienates parts of your audience. Wtf does this have to do with SCOTUS?

I love your videos, thank you for breaking down complex topics. Have you ever done a video highlighting people who are trying to address some of the issues you bring up in your videos? Like the over importance on metrics unrelated to clinical performance, lack of economic diversity in medical schools, too much emphasis on sub par research as a means of getting to competitive specialties, etc?

Agree—resources for URIM should be distributed way earlier than the finishing line. Maybe the Third Grade…then you will find research shows family involvement is one of the major reasons.

Loser: MD/PhD programs

Another great video (as usual)! I thought many of the same things you did when I heard the announcement. Definitely agree that financial help needs to be deployed earlier in the premed stage if they truly want to make med school economically diverse.

I can't wait to watch the DO school & debt video. I'm a DO student and my debt 100% affected my choice to pursue a specialty over primary care. I know the data is 'null' but not in my case.

My vibe as a premed, which you touched on, is that the med schools that go tuition-free become radically competitive, understandably so. More privileged premed students are generally more competitive, especially in terms of MCAT/GPA. You could argue that free tuition schools may even harm students from disadvantaged backgrounds, by raising the bar for matriculants. NYU was never especially diverse economically, but it's even less so today, representing a total failure of their supposed goals. KP actually did great in this regard, having many disadvantaged students. Hopefully Einstein matches that.

I'm just not confident in these schools to perform holistic review that really comprehends and reasonably frames struggle/the detriment on competitiveness stemming from being disadvantaged.

JHU going "tuition free" is great, if they didn't accept so many privileged students to begin with (or made plans to restrict this). Even 150k for a household, the lowest threshold, is quite high for most of America.