Free medical school at Johns Hopkins? Here is how much debt Philly students could save if their schools did the same.

Most Johns Hopkins medical students will no longer pay tuition starting this fall to attend one of the nation’s premier medical schools, following a $1 billion dollar gift from the nonprofit founded by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, businessman, and philanthropist.

The donation announced Monday will cover the full tuition for students from households earning less than $300,000. Students from families earning less than $175,000 will also have their fees and living expenses covered.

(For context: Half of Philadelphia households earned $56,517 or less in 2022, the first time in 16 years that the city’s median household income eclipsed Baltimore’s.)

Philadelphia-area medical schools (and their students) are left looking from afar with envy as Hopkins joins a small but growing list of schools offering free tuition to most or all students through philanthropic gifts.

The average debt of a medical doctor who graduated from a Philadelphia school is roughly $200,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a nonprofit whose members include medical schools and academic health systems across the nation.

Locally, graduates of the Drexel University College of Medicine reported the highest average debt: $257,732. Students graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have the lowest average debt at $142,177.

A good chunk of that debt comes from tuition.

A Pennsylvania resident would have to pay just over $56,000 a year in tuition to attend the Temple Lewis Katz School of Medicine. At Penn and Drexel, the tuition is around $70,000 a year.

Even without gifts from a billionaire like Bloomberg, most students don’t pay the full tuition cost. More than 80% of Philly-area medical students receive some amount of aid.

The data from the Association of American Medical Colleges doesn’t include information about the region’s osteopathic medical schools, providing another path to graduating doctors that runs parallel to the MD track for practicing medicine.

But according to information from the school’s websites themselves, the debt figures are similar.

At the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, recent graduates graduated with an average debt of $229,774. And at the Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine, more than half of students who take loans were over $200,000 in debt.

Hopkins’ move follows a similar announcement in February from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which received a $1 billion gift from Ruth Gottesman, a widow of a Wall Street investor, to make its medical education tuition-free. Other schools offering varying degrees of extended scholarship and free tuition include the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine.