Medical School for Physician-Scientists Will Offer Free Tuition

The Cleveland Clinic’s medical school will offer full-tuition scholarships to all of its students in an effort to encourage more people to pursue careers in academic medicine, the clinic announced today.

The free-tuition offer, which will begin with the class that enters in July, will initially be supported through endowment income and clinical revenues. The clinic hopes eventually to pay for it entirely through endowment income. Students will still pay about $22,000 a year for living expenses, fees, books, and equipment.

“The average debt for students graduating from private U.S. medical schools, such as the Lerner College of Medicine, is more than $150,000, making many graduates less likely to pursue careers in academic medicine,” said Delos M. (Toby) Cosgrove, president of the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western University. “By providing full-tuition support, we want to ensure that debt does not hinder the ability of our graduates to pursue academic careers as physician scientists.”

In 2002 the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Case Western Reserve University announced that they were opening a new medical school to train physicians and scientists for clinical-research careers. The school accepted its first students in 2004. —Katherine Mangan