Call me a dirty European, but my first reaction to this is "This is why you're meant to have a working tax system". I agree that tuition for doctors shouldn't be usurious, but is this really the best use of $1bn? Imagine how much better we could make things if all the people who got rich off Berkshire Hathaway put their money towards good causes and we actually focused that spending on the best outcomes for everyone rather than just helicopter money for random pet causes. It's just such a weird system.
as a dirty third-worlder, there are far worse ways to spend that kind of money. like someone else posted here, you can earn insane amounts of interest by sitting that money around somewhere. with that, it would have been possible to instead provide scholarship to select students every year for like perpetuity.
but this one relieves the donator from the responsibility and at the end of the day, a very selfless work. i would not judge it any beyond that.
Yeah don't get me wrong, it's definitely a better thing to do with the money than some of the alternatives. It's just difficult to look at the system as a whole and go "Ok, so Xmillion kids in the US are going to go medical schoool this year, 99% are going to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, but these lucky 10,000 are going to get it for free".
Meanwhile, you look at that wealth and trace it through and think "Hang on, that's an incredible amount of wealth accumulated over decades. I wonder how much tax revenue that resulted in? $0.
Of course you can do worse. You could buy weapons, and pay mercenaries to kill people and destroy infrastructure with them. The point is you can do so much better than let generation hoard this much of economical power and wait hundred years for some of them accidentally do something benficial with it.
I keep seeing this note about the European System.... if that system is so great then why aren't the best Medical Universities in the EU?
From my quick search a majority seem to all top-ten be in the US and UK. #16 gets you Karolinska Institute but even then they are followed by more US Medical Schools.
