1y ago

New York medical school eliminates tuition after $1bn gift

www.bbc.com

The record-breaking donation came from a 93-year-old former professor, who is the widow of a wealthy investor.

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1y ago

A New York City medical school will offer students free tuition following a $1bn donation from the 93-year-old widow of a major Wall Street investor

www.bbc.com /news/world-us-canada-68407453

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1y ago

New York medical school eliminates tuition after $1B gift

www.bbc.com /news/world-us-canada-68407453

20 comments

Is there a lemmy version of r/OrphanCrushingMachine ?
At $60K tuition x 500 students = $30M / yr. Simple interest on $1B at 3% per year over 20 years = $30M / yr.
They can pay for 500 medical students, practically forever, without touching the principal.
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_College_of_Medicine, in 2021, they matriculated 183 students (out of 9773 applicants). That means they can double the number of 'free tuition' students and the endowment will still keep growing.
how to be a good billionaire: give it all away at the first opportunity
no idea how much she has left, but i imagine it's still plenty to live on
- how to be a good billionaire
  No such thing. You cannot get to that point without trampling all over and exploiting others.
  give it all away at the first opportunity
  Similarly, a person who would do this wouldn't hoard enough to qualify in the first place
  
  yeah fair. it seems like she got the money from her husband, but still. getting that money in the first place is inherently unethical
  
  It takes far less money than a billion dollars be able to make world-changing charitable donations. You could, say, fund a light rail system (yes, even in a decently-sized city) or housing for every homeless person in your home town for vastly less than that.
  There's only so much you can invest in yourself and your personal hobbies before there is nothing more you can realistically buy. Any normal, reasonable person, once already confronted with a luxurious lifestyle for themselves and their loves ones that will last forever, looks at all their extra money and decides it would make them feel good to make those world-changing charitable donations. And so they do it.
  I'm sure everyone's point of balancing anxiety and lifestyle is different... but any reasonable person, it's WAY before they hit a billion.
  In short: a normal person starts wildly giving away their wealth long before they become a billionaire. You have to be some kind of antisocial weirdo not to.
  
  If you read the summary, she didn't hoard it. Her husband did, and she gave it away pretty much immediately after he died.
So that would be 200 schools if we liquidated one really annoying billionaire. Just sayin
- Expropriate or bust!
While no individuals should ever be that wealthy to begin with, it's good to see some of them are capable of letting it go in their old age and returning it to the community rather than selfishly hording it.
- rather than selfishly hording it.
  Make no mistake, even those who give away sums that to us seen unimaginable, are still doing that.
- Sounds like it was her husband who hoarded the wealth, and that she gave it up once he left it to her.
  So though she'd have benefitted greatly from being married to someone so rich, that money wasn't under her control until he died.
  Seems her own work was worthwhile to the community.
95% of this will be going to the upper middle class.
But textbooks are still $1,500 and there are $50k in fees.
/s. Sorta.
It’s a great gift, but tuition isn’t the only expense.
- Hopefully PDFs of medical textbooks are as easy to find as they are for engineering textbooks.
- With a huge pot of money infinitely annuitized like this, they could literally be paying their students to attend.
  Maybe that's the next frontier. Hopefully. It's definitely the best way to ensure access to education for the poor.

20 comments