Medical School – The 74

Bloomberg’s $1B Gift to Johns Hopkins Will Make Med School Free for Most Students

Amir Pasic — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:01:00 +0000

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Mike Bloomberg, the media mogul and former New York City mayor, has given Johns Hopkins University for most its current and future medical students, the school and announced on July 8, 2024. The gift will also expand financial aid for students studying several other fields at Bloomberg’s alma mater. He .

Emily Schwartz Greco, The Conversation’s Philanthropy and Nonprofits Editor, spoke with about this gift and its significance. Pasic is the dean of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, the world’s first school devoted to research and teaching about philanthropy.

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Is this a big deal?

I consider it a milestone in terms of its size, even if it’s smaller than the to fund scholarships for its undergraduate students.

It also matters because it’s part of a pattern. Earlier this year, Ruth Gottesman that will also make tuition free for students. Both gifts will make a medical education much more accessible.

And this is a moment of crisis in higher education: is too high, too many , and and are getting degrees.

Do you think it will help increase access to health care?

It’s hard to tell.

Many health experts want to see government policies changed to make health care education more accessible across the board, rather than at just a few universities. But if more leading medical schools start changing in this way, it could ripple through the system and make a difference.

It’s going to be incumbent on medical schools getting big gifts to make tuition free to show that these donations are benefiting the public and not simply producing more physicians who make a lot of money by primarily treating privileged people.

To deliver on the promise, I believe they will need to prove that significant numbers of their graduates are committed to the public purpose of the profession.

That would mean and community care in low-income neighborhoods, and more pediatricians. When med students need to take out large loans, they may end up in cosmetic surgery or treating wealthy people with golf injuries rather than attending to needs that are more glaring. Such burdensome debt loads won’t be the case any longer at Hopkins.

Nothing I saw in the gift compels those students to actually make that choice once they graduate. But the goal is that the school will recruit more people from low-income communities and free up more physicians to pursue the public aspect of their calling to serve people with the highest needs.

The med schools will bear a responsibility to create a culture that encourages and expects their alumni to go into those spaces and perhaps even looks down upon those who simply go into high-paid areas of the profession. Just waiving tuition – which – and doing business as usual won’t make a difference.

Is it wise for Bloomberg to give so much to his alma mater?

There have been a lot of critiques that too much money is going to a few privileged institutions that attract a .

What kind of effect are you achieving when you invest so much in one institution when the problems that we’re facing are quite systemic? How many more people could be reached with that same investment in, say, community colleges, and the public universities that don’t usually get philanthropic gifts at this level?

You can say that making systemic change requires you to distribute resources or . But Bloomberg Philanthropies has made the case that the leading institutions that attract some of the most prepared and most exceptional candidates have a particular role to play, and it hopes others will follow its lead.

Bloomberg isn’t just giving back to his alma mater and giving back to a place that did great things for him, individually. He’s also enunciating a hope that it will create an example for other donors to follow. Whether that ambition will be effective or not, we don’t know.

Sometimes we look at philanthropy as if it were purely public funding, or the equivalent of a policy endeavor. At the end of the day, we have to remember that this is Bloomberg’s own money. He’s free to make whatever decisions he wants.

I think it’s important to realize that he has his own theory of change – that elite institutions will bring the kind of change that our society needs. You may disagree with that and think that he should fund institutions that serve many more students and will propel upward in society.

But it does appear that Johns Hopkins’ over the past decade.

Is the timing significant, given some of the doubts about higher ed’s value?

This gift is in some ways more typical of higher education giving before a number of over the campus turbulence that began after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

Many people are asking what the purpose of philanthropy is for colleges and universities and trying to compel them to use their endowments for what they consider to be better purposes despite restrictions on the use of those funds.

Students will be eligible for free tuition only if their families make less than $300,000 a year. What do you think about that?

Some schools have taken a different approach by ending tuition for everyone, such as the , and the .

I think only ending tuition for people who and limiting free living expenses to those in households earning less than $175,000 is reasonable.

Otherwise, Johns Hopkins could potentially squander funds on students who could easily pay and whose access and experience would not be curtailed if they had to pay for medical school without any financial aid.

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NW Arkansas medical school, institute aim for transformative health care model

Antoinette Grajeda — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 18:00:00 +0000

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Northwest Arkansas officials hope a new medical school and institute being developed beside Crystal Bridges will solve a host of health care industry problems in a manner that can be replicated.

The Arkansas Legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Health, Welfare and Labor convened Wednesday inside Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which will share its 120-acre campus with two health-focused facilities currently under construction — a nonprofit organization called the Whole Health Institute and its sister organization the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine.

The museum and the two new projects are backed by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, who described herself Wednesday as “the chief cheerleader for transformative health care.” Walton said she has “a close and not symbiotic relationship with health care” as a result of a 12-year chronic condition and multiple surgeries.

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Her latest venture was inspired, in part, by a that showed the region is losing $950 million annually as residents seek medical care elsewhere. That statistic “really got my wheels spinning,” Walton said.

“Arkansas is not a wealthy state,” she said. “We cannot afford to export a billion dollars in medical services elsewhere. Never mind the impact it has on families.”

From the report, Walton said officials developed three pillars towards creating a transformative health care model:

Training more doctors, and differently, so they focus on keeping people healthy.
Transforming and realigning the health care payment structure so doctors are rewarded for keeping people healthy.
Figuring out how to get that $1 billion back into Arkansas.

Walton said she also wants to address the rural health care crisis and believes that can be addressed through increased broadband access that will allow for virtual care that can support the few rural doctors the state does have.

Construction is underway on both the institute and medical school, which are expected to open in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The 154,000 square-foot medical school will integrate the arts, humanities and whole health principles with traditional medical education, officials said.

The school is working through the accreditation process and was recently granted candidate status. Founding Dean and CEO Dr. Sharmila Makhija said the next step is a site visit in about six months. The medical school will then be able to recruit students for the fall of 2025.

The inaugural class will have 48 students, and the school will receive full accreditation once they graduate. Enrollment will likely double at the point, but that will be the maximum amount the school can support, Makhija said.

The creation of the school addresses a recommendation in the 2019 NWA Council report to expand medical education either through growth at the existing University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Northwest program or the development of an independent medical school.

The report also recommended the addition of 6,000 health care jobs and 200 residency positions.

Dr. Sharmila Makhija, Alice L. Walton School of Medicine Founding Dean and CEO, and Walter Harris, Whole Health Institute President and CEO, answer Arkansas legislators’ questions during a meeting in Bentonville on Nov. 1, 2023. (Antoinette Grajeda/Arkansas Advocate)

The Arkansas Legislative Council responded in June 2021 by to support an initiative by UAMS Northwest and Washington Regional Medical Center to establish up to 92 graduate medical positions by 2030. The first residents arrived this summer.

Increasing medical education opportunities could increase in-state health-care providers because students are more likely to work in the communities where they completed their residency, according to a recent study. A found that 57% of individuals who completed residency training from 2011 through 2020 are practicing in the state where they did their residency training.

Arkansas currently has three medical schools — Arkansas College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Smith, New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine in Jonesboro and UAMS in Little Rock. UAMS established a regional campus in Fayetteville in 2007.

With regard to realigning the health care payment structure, Walter Harris, Whole Health Institute President and CEO, said it’s currently volume based. Instead, doctors should be incentivized to keep patients healthy.

“It’s not about the number of patients you see, it’s seeing the patients for the right reasons at the right time at the right places…so it’s a different kind of model,” Harris said.

Transforming health care will require a combination of bringing in specialty care and having an institute that can work with the medical school and all local providers, Walton said.

“We want to involve every health care system,” she said. “This isn’t about winners and losers. It’s about how do we connect and make us all better. And so that’s what we’re trying to figure out and what I’ve figured out is it’s not very easy, but I’m stubborn, so we will continue.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .