Philanthropy at its finest! And what joy it must afford Dr. Vangelos's entire family.
3
That is really going to anger some of the oligarchs, so thanks to a physician for giving back.
4
In Israel, doctors go to school free.
In Cuba, doctors go to school free.
In Canada, doctors go to school free.
In the US, we enslave our young to appease the rich.
7
The West 168th Street Medical School physical plant is failing such that its becoming difficult to work there. How about putting some of that money into repairing the older building?
1
Won't these grants be taxable income to the students if the tax bill passes? Just another example of the damage this bill will do.
7
As a college professor, I don't agree with scholarships and I am very scared of free college.
Has anyone stopped to think how low the motivation of the average college student is? Yes, of course we hope Ivy League medical students would be different, but in the trenches at the college I work at, you have a good 25% of students who find it too annoying to attend class, who find it too annoying to do work, who blame the professor when they don't even buy the textbook (which can be bought for $20 used).
I am much more in favor of loan forgiveness for those who try and meet their goals, whether it be getting a good GPA or engaging in a needed career. Loan forgiveness means the student has to put their money where their mouth is - they don't start off scot free, they have to earn being paid back.
3
I does "trickle down" occasionally, I guess.
However, it would be nicer if this was not an exception, but the rule.
Free education should be a right, for all citizens, just like health care.
Let's hope the tuition covered by this generous gift is not deemed taxable income for the student.
I can't imagine being taxed on 90k a year for four years can be cheap for a medical student looking at making a modest salary for 3-7 years of residency and maybe a fellowship after medical school.
3
This isn’t just a good gesture, it’s an investment in the future. As a medical student weighed down by several hundred thousand dollars of debt, I am not likely to start a family any time soon or purchase a home until I am in my forties (I am 29). By graduating debt free, these students are able to become productive members of society much sooner than their debt-laden counterparts. Also, we are the only civilized country that allows students to accrue this type of debt. Other countries like for example Denmark, allow their medical students to attend for free with a stipend.
4
A very impressive gesture. Helping stressed and tapped out new doctors is an excellent idea.
2
Dr. Vagelos and Mrs. Vagelos can do anything they wish with their money. The fact that they choose to use it as a tool to ease the stress that new doctors feel when those huge loan statements start rolling in should be praised. Period. Let's remember that, before reconciliation, the GOP tax bill has the potential to remove the deductability of student loans. Anything that makes life a little easier for ANY students transitioning from a professional school to a profession deserves praise. Bravo.
2
What a wonderful gesture by Dr and Mrs Vagelos. They do great good with their money.
18
I thought P&S would be the holdout on naming a medical school after a contributor. At least Vagelos is a doctor. Not so of course Weil. And, they put their wives names on the unwieldy titles, too. Better if the MD grads just paid off their loans -- with help if they are in public medicine or research.
4
Nor is Ken Langone, though his position as former CEO of Home Depot might qualify him as an honorary orthopedic surgeon.
Generosity at its best.
6
I hope they will encourage their students to go into primary care. Presently student debt is a major reason medical students avoid primary care
16
Good news indeed. Would the cost of medicine be cheaper if less doctors owe such significant debt? My post delivery doctor, a first year doctor, panicked when my new born appeared cross-eyed. A 15 minute by a pediatric neurologist set us back around $1500.
3
This is more giving to those who've already got. The money would help the nation more if it was spread around the state schools. Relying on this anglo tradition of charity, even enormous gifts like this, is not going to educate the next generation. Columbia, like the rest of the Ivy League is a place that educates those with the ability to pay, not the brightest, but the most wealthy. Then a few geniuses from the working class are mixed in as tokens for PR purposes, but also to make the school look good through their later achievements. Cast your eyes around the headlines and read what the progeny of america's wealthy have achieved. W. went to Yale. Jared went to Harvard. As a society we educate the wrong people. We don't teach them ethics, so even if the rest of it sinks into their privileged skulls, society is the loser.
4
Gee, I attended an Ivy League university and I was taught ethics. And not only was I working class, but my spouse who I met at college was on free lunches in a school district that was in the lower 5% of our state. (why I couldn't meet a prince or magnate's son I'll never know).
You have to understand what a life changer going to an Ivy League university is for a student. It's not a life changer for W and Jared. It's an entitlement that is a check box.
FYI, the number one reason that lower income students don't get accepted to my college has been test scores vs. grades. And the number one reason my spouse got into an Ivy was having high test scores and being valedictorian. The first thing he did when he got to college was start working tutoring other low income kids, just like himself.
My spouse is the second one in his extended family of 50+ people who went to college. The other is unemployed and has been for years. And he is mostly white by the way, as are most of his family.
If you don't understand Questbridge and the fact that Ivies give free rides to low income (used to be $60,000 or less per family; now, that is, before, my spouse had mostly grants but still had $25,000 to pay back on an $80,000 education), you are not trying to find facts, you are trying to find fault.
2
This is terrific. However, will some of this funding be used for nursing degree candidates? A Columbia NP candidate can be left with debts of six figures as well, and they are crucial to the success of healthcare in this country.
21
probably not. this is specifically a gift to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The School of Nursing is a separate school (and they're probably courting different donors)
The need to pick another school and program.
1
This is a great story!!! I admire the doctors for funding an endowment to educate our future, bright doctors without the burden of carrying their student debt.
5
good for them...the right thing to do.
5
Hats off to Dr. and Mrs Vagelos! This is heroic. BRAVO!
4
Wonderful! In addition to these individual acts, as a nation we need to invest in our students. They are our tomorrow's innovators, teachers and tax payers. By burdening them with a huge student loan, we actively discourage them going for higher and more professional degrees and instead get a lesser job quickly and start paying off those loans. Our nation makes it harder for our own college students to get the education they need and then we complain about foreign doctors, engineers, scientists and professors. We can't have it both ways!
5
Exactly what the doctor ordered. Delightful news!
2
Vagelos for President.
A scientist, a philanthropist, and a true Christian.
4
I agree; Vagelos might make a fine president.
But the article makes no mention of which religion Vagelos might be affiliated with, so there's no reason to interject your assumption about his affiliation. Religions/bronze-age-cults poison everything.
Wow.
2
Thank you Dr. Vagelos !
There is amazing innovation coming out of Columbia's labs and from its students. We are working with other alumni to foster that innovation and translate that into successful startups ...
1
Imagine a country where the 99% don't have to wait for absurdly wealthy 1% to randomly decide to shower their underserved gains down on the rest of us.
18
I wonder whether this will have the intended effect. One can imagine that this will make an already super selective medical school even more so. The best and the brightest who attend are not going to elect to go into primary care specialties, low prestige specialties. These students are going to do as they have been doing, look to enter high paying high prestige specialist careers. They'll just have no debt.
3
BRAVO.
And for those who would not qualify for the grants or full scholarships, I would suggest a permanent loan forgiveness programs for those that work in high-need/low paying specialties, on Indian Reservations, and in poorly served centers, like the inner city poor and the rural poor.
I hope they sponsor medical education and institutions in developing countries as well to combat brain drains so harmful to those fragile countries.
4
While this generosity is wonderful for those future students, I wonder how Dr. Vagelos was able to amass such a fortune? What is is about our system that a medical doctor can become so wealthy? Was that his objective or was he lucky? Pharmaceuticals in this country is unregulated. Owners of another wealthy pharmaceutical company that produces oxycontin has donated generously to NYC museums, while creating an opiod addiction epidemic.
1
These drugs can be lifesavers... I was on both oxycodone and oxycontin for three months after my first knee replacement and again for another three months after my second knee replacement a year later.
When these drugs are used properly, there is no reason for addiction. I had no problem stopping them when they were no longer needed for the pain.
I am very grateful to the makers of these two drugs, They are not at fault if some people choose to abuse them.
1
This is a wonderful act of philanthropy and generosity. One of Dr. Vagelos' children was a resident with me at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in the 1980s. It is an incredible institution, whose physicians, scientists, and former students have contributed to many of the advances in medicine that we take for granted today. But let us be clear, there is no reason in the world that our government could not be supporting our students as undergraduates and graduates. One of my physician friends in the Germany has a son who is going to medical school in another European Union Country, Belgium, where it costs about $1,300 (1000 Euros) a semester. If you think their medical education is any different from ours, you are sadly mistaken. I collaborate with physicians from around the world. On a recent plane flight I was sitting next to two nurses who owe tens of thousands of dollars to loan companies, at ridiculous rates, to pay off their student loans. This is simply absurd. If anyone thinks this is how you make America great again, they are sadly mistaken.
17
What an extraordinarily generous and far-sighted couple. These are the true builders of society, not the types that suffocate society with their insatiable greed and cause so much harm to coming generations. Thank you. This will go a long way in helping so many brilliant students eager to learn the art and science of healing.
5
If only others with more money than they know what to do with would follow this incredible example.
7
The extremely wealthy do plenty of good things with their money. In the end, it's their choice how and where to spend it.
There are surely others, in addition to Dr. Vagelos, who are in a position to make similar kinds of donations and in so doing hopefully steer more med school graduates into less-lucrative and thus relatively underserved specialties. Hopefully these others will step up as well.
8
If all it takes is $150 million to accomplish this, lets encourage schools to hold off building those new buildings and create something far more valuable for students. We get lots of new builds and wings by donated by wealthy individual, when the focus should be on learning and cost-effectiveness prioritized.
9
This gift is great and all. But it should be pointed out that while MDs in the US graduate with an astronomically high average amount of student debt, they are also in perhaps the best suited position of any graduate student to pay their loans back for 2 reasons.
1. Practicing clinicians are always payed handsomely in the U.S.
2. There are - and will remain to be for the foreseeable future - ample employment opportunities for them.
What about addressing the indentured-servitude, exploitive aspects of residency the hospitals will force their MD graduates to endure afterwards?
When can we see these donations for the now overtaxed PhD programs? Most graduates won't have a fleeting shot of making over 50k a year within 10 years of graduating. Same with social worker graduates, or any degrees in the humanities for that matter.
As far as I can tell, medical students are already 1%'ers (though they weren't all born into it). These aren't the people who suffer from decades of crippling unpaid loans.
9
Medical students and many practicing docs are FAR from the 1%. I say this as a former refugee whose family came with only the clothes on our backs and as an internist/ geriatrician/ medical researcher. I am deeply appreciative of the small grants and federal loans that allowed me to go to a state medical school (one of the cheapest) but I also scrimped and saved for years, living below my means and many of my peers, to pay off my loans. As a doc, sure, my income is higher than the average but it's definitely not in the top 1%, much less 5%. Some specialties make a lot but not your average family doc, internist, pediatrician, or geriatrician, ironically the specialties that this country needs most. And for PhDs, industry can provide stable jobs that pay a lot. So sure, fund PhDs more but there's no need to pit PhDs vs MDs.
14
The article does state that the intended result is for more med school students to be able pursue careers in lower-paying specialties.
3
That is what I hope - that the money is spent on the most needed specialties, either overall or in the most needed areas.
To put a family medicine doctor, not just any but a good one, in an underserved community is a miracle.
I also hope with Dr. Vagelos' background that he consider pushing telemedicine and doctors who make house calls as part of the initiative.
This act of generosity is well targeted. My son attends another private medical school with a similar tuition and has taken on massive student debt. In the third and fourth years, the small scholarships he receives from outside organizations are stepping up funding, but the school itself does not give aid to other than the poorest of the poor, who of course are few in number. He has described his situation to his school's dean of medicine, who seemed shocked to hear of it. Most of his classmates are either wealthy or planning to enter the military after graduation to repay their tuition. Unfortunately, he's neither of those, more interested in doing cancer research. I've spoken to other promising students contemplating medical careers who have opted instead for PhD's, which provide funding.
Our country has its priorities seriously messed up.
22
This should represent the beginning of an effort to fully subsidize education for our young men and women on a national scale. It makes sense. Medical training is a long and arduous path, requiring 7-10 years of additional training AFTER college. Free education allows medical school graduates to work in rural locations where income is often lower without financial stress. It would free them up to choose to do research, a traditionally lower paying occupation (compared to medical practice), with less financial worry. This could only be good for our country. Yet somehow I imagine our current group of Republicans lawmakers would still find a way to sell this as freeloading.
24
It is amazing and wonderful!
It would be great if tuition could be waived for doctors going into practices that are underserved--for example rural areas, general practitioners, or inner-city psychiatry.
Do you realize how difficult it is to find a psychiatrist for chidren that takes insurance in NYC? The first appointment is $600 at NY Presb/ CU Medical school. And they don't take ANY insurance. (None.)
They must be waiting for Donald Trump to make appointments, certainly not the lower income people in the neighborhood that the hospital is in.
33
There are a variety of public service loan forgiveness programs, especially for doctors and other clinicians who serve in underserved areas. They are underfunded, but the programs definitely exist. Like everything, they just need a consistent amount of funding from Congress.
2
For talk therapy for children and adolescents, try the Youth Counseling League in NYC.
2
An excellent action! It should be emulated by all of the Ivy League. Their endowments are so large that free education for all attendees could be accommodated with the rounding errors in their bslence sheet.
20
An amazing gift for Columbia Medical School student Doctors!
12