2024-02-27 21:46:07
A New York medical school will eliminate tuition following receiving a “transformative gift” valued at $1 billion from a powerful benefactor, the parent organization of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine said in a statement.
The charitable donation is one of the largest acts of philanthropy ever publicly received by an educational institution in the United States and will make the annual tuition of almost $60,000 without discount zero for students.
“The Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received a transformative gift from Ruth L. Gottesman, Ed.D., chair of the board of trustees at Einstein and member of the board of directors of Montefiore Health System,” the organization said in a statement on Monday night.
The school and its affiliated hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, are located in the Bronx, the poorest borough of New York City, where health figures are some of the worst in the eastern US state, according to official statistics.
Gottesman, 93, was a clinical professor of pediatrics at Einstein and the wife of David Gottesman, a former Wall Street financier. They were important donors to the educational center throughout her life.
A clip of the announcement made on campus by those responsible for Albert Einstein, posted on social media, showed the moment when the student audience reacted enthusiastically to the news, cheering, shouting and applauding.
According to the American press, the US$1 billion that Dr. Gottesman, 93 years old, will donate to this faculty is enough to pay in perpetuity the expenses of the students enrolled at the time of the announcement, expenses that range from US$59,000 a year. .
The British press, specifically the BBC, recently published a report on Ruth Gottesman, the donor, and revealed that she is the wife of a deceased billionaire tycoon. She, according to the media report, surely agreed at some point in her life with her husband that they would leave this fortune to strengthen the education of the most needy people, in this case low-income people who study in the Bronx (United States). Joined).
“The benefactor is the widow of David “Sandy” Gottesman, who was an early investor in Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s multinational conglomerate. Sandy, to whom Ruth was married for 72 years, passed away in September 2022 at the age of 96. Throughout her life, the investor, whose fortune was valued by Forbes at US$3 billion at the time of his death, donated US$330 million to charity,” the BBC noted.
Similarly, The New York Times revived an interview with Gottesman in which she said that her husband told her to do with the money what she wanted and considered right. “He left me, without my knowledge, an entire portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway shares. The instructions were simple: ‘Do what you think is right with him,’” she told the New York media.
“I wanted to fund Einstein students to receive free tuition,” he said. “Over the years, I had interviewed dozens of future Einstein medical students. Tuition costs more than $59,000 a year, and many graduated with crippling medical school debt. According to the school, nearly 50 percent of its students owed more than $200,000 following graduating. At most other New York City medical schools, fewer than 25 percent of new doctors owed that amount. Nearly half of Einstein’s first-year medical students are New Yorkers and nearly 60 percent are women. About 48 percent of current medical students at Einstein are white, 29 percent are Asian, 11 percent are Hispanic and 5 percent are black,” the American media reported.
“We have excellent medical students, but this will open the doors to many other students whose economic status is such that they would not even think regarding going to medical school,” he said.
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