New York U.’s School of Medicine Goes Tuition-Free

New York University’s School of Medicine said on Thursday that it would provide full-tuition scholarships to all current and future students.

The decision was a response to students’ rising debt, which deters many of them from entering certain fields of medicine, according to a news release. Each scholarship will cover a sum that amounts to $55,018 a year per student — about $24 million a year in total.

The announcement was made as a surprise ending to the school’s annual white-coat ceremony, a tradition in which new students mark the beginning of their medical careers.

“Overwhelming student debt is fundamentally reshaping the medical profession in ways that are adversely affecting health care,” the university said. “Saddled with staggering student loans, many medical-school graduates choose higher-paying specialties, drawing talent away from less-lucrative fields like primary care, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology. Moreover, the financial barriers discourage many promising high-school and college students from considering a career in medicine altogether due to fears about the costs associated with medical school.”

NYU now has the nation’s only highly ranked medical school with free tuition, according to the news release. Other medical schools, including those at Columbia University and the University of California at Los Angeles, have tried to ease student debt with merit scholarships and loan elimination, The Wall Street Journal notes. Smaller medical schools have also provided free tuition.

Rafael Rivera, associate dean for admissions and financial aid, said NYU had planned such a step for about a decade. Students can be dissuaded from studying medicine because of “soul-crushing” debt, which can top $300,000, he said.

The scholarships have the added benefit of encouraging gender, ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic diversity, he said. “I want to make sure we have the largest, most talented pool to choose from, because our job is really to pick those individuals who we think are going to transform health care for our patients.”

The scholarships will be funded by an endowment the school is building toward a goal of about $600 million.

Perry Tsai, president of the American Medical Student Association, said NYU’s move is a “wonderful development.”

Student debt can influence not only what specialty medical students choose to study, but also where they choose to practice after graduation, said Tsai, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s medical school. The need for primary-care physicians and for doctors in underserved or rural areas is crucial, he said, but those choices do not pay as much.

“For all of these things that our nation needs in our work force,” he said, “finding ways to reduce the cost of medical school are ways to recruit or get more physicians to fill those gaps in our health-care system.”

Both Tsai and Rivera said they hoped that other medical colleges would start similar initiatives. Even if they can’t offer full tuition, the debt crisis needs to be remedied somehow, they said. “This isn’t an NYU-specific issue by any stretch,” said Rivera.

“This is one school, and I’m really happy for that school and its students,” Tsai said. “But it’s only one small dent in the larger problem.”

Follow Teghan Simonton on Twitter at @teghan_simonton, or email her at teghan.simonton@chronicle.com.