Wall Street billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to give $1 billion to Johns Hopkins University, home of one of the country’s most prestigious medical programs, to make medical school tuition-free for most students and increase financial aid for students in nursing, public health and other non-medical graduate schools
KEY FACTS
The gift, which was first reported by the Washington Post, was announced Monday in a letter in the Bloomberg Philanthropies annual report and is in addition to the $1.8 billion the charity donated to Hopkins in 2018.
Johns Hopkins will use the donation to offer free medical school tuition, which normally amounts to about $65,000 per year for four years, to any family that earns less than $300,000 per year, the Post reported, and students from families earning less than $175,000 annually will also have their fees and living expenses covered.
Bloomberg, who is worth an estimated $106.2 billion, said the gift will help the school “attract more of the nation’s brightest minds and help free more of them to pursue the fields that most inspire them, rather than ones that will best enable them to repay loans.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.