What would you do if you somehow ended up with an extra $1 billion? One New York woman has decided to use it to provide free medical school to students in the Bronx.
Ruth Gottesman, a former professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the widow of a Wall Street financier, has donated that sum to the medical institution, The New York Times reported on Monday. Going forward, it will be used to cover tuition for all students in perpetuity.
“We have terrific medical students, but this will open it up for many other students whose economic status is such that they wouldn’t even think about going to medical school,” Gottesman told the Times.
The money comes from Gottesman’s late husband, David, who was a protégé of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway. When David died in 2022, he left his wife a portfolio of company stock, with instructions for her to do with it whatever she thought was right. She realized that was giving it to Einstein to benefit future generations of doctors.
Gottesman’s $1 billion gift is one of the largest charitable donations to any educational institution in the United States and is likely the largest ever to a medical school, The New York Times noted. It will be particularly impactful at Einstein, which is located in New York’s poorest borough and where almost half of students owe more than $200,000 after graduating. At other N.Y.C. med schools, less than 25 percent of grads typically owe that much.
“That’s what makes me very happy about this gift,” Gottesman said. “I have the opportunity not just to help Phil [Ozuah, the head of the school], but to help Montefiore [the school’s affiliated hospital] and Einstein in a transformative way—and I’m just so proud and so humbled—both—that I could do it.”
Currently, Einstein charges more than $59,000 a year for tuition. Nearly half of first-year students are from New York, and almost 60 percent are women. With Gottesman’s gift, the school joins NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine in offering free tuition to all students. And while Gottesman’s donation is more than enough for a renaming of Einstein, she’s happy to allow the German physicist to remain the institution’s namesake.
Authors
-
Tori Latham