$1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School - The New York Times
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Ruth Gottesman, a longtime professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is making free tuition available to all students going forward.
Ruth Gottesman is giving $1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Credit...David Dee Delgado for The New York Times
By Joseph Goldstein
Feb. 26, 2024
The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students going forward.
The donor, Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.
The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protege of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Mr. Buffett built.
The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it is going to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city's poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county in New York. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city's wealthiest borough.
Dr. Gottesman said her donation would enable new doctors to begin their careers without medical school debt, which often exceeds $200,000. She also hoped it would broaden the student body to include people who could not otherwise afford to go to medical school.
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Great!
No 200K student loan debt! This is wonderful!
Wonderful what a gift more doctors that would never had had a chance before Mrs Gottesman.
I wonder how much of the gift she gets to write off.
But it is very generous of her to donate all of it.
I'm confident she gets to write off as much as she legally can. And yes, it's very generous of her to do this.
I guess I was kind of surprised that no one pointed out how her and her husband made all that money on the backs of the poor and all. and amassed that wealth by not paying their fair share.