Founded in 1841 as the University Medical College, the New York University School of Medicine is one of the foremost medical schools in the United States. Ranked third among U.S. medical schools, NYU School of Medicine offers an innovative accelerated three-year MD program. It was launched in 2013 and reduces the traditional medical school curriculum by one full year. For the class of 2019, NYU received 7,807 applications and interviewed 1027 applicants for a class of 132 medical students.

On Aug. 16 2018, The NYU School of Medicine announced that they will be offering full-tuition scholarships to all current students and future students in their MD degree program, regardless of merit or financial need. Leading into the 2018-19 year, this equates to a scholarship of $55,018 for each student. In a statement, NYU said that it would be the only top-ranked medical school in the nation to offer full-tuition scholarships to all students. To date, only a handful of institutions have tried to make medical education tuition-free, including UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. However, UCLA’s merit based program pays for the entire cost of medical school for all four years, including tuition, fees, books, and living expenses for roughly 20 percent of its students.

Many medical school graduates leave medical school in high amounts of debt. This may still be the case even after the implementation of NYU’s scholarship policy. Even with this full-tuition scholarship, this does not cover NYU’s required health insurance, room and board, books, and other miscellaneous costs associated. The estimated cost after the scholarship is $27,108.
NYU said that it has raised more than $450 million of the $600 million that it anticipates will be necessary to finance the tuition plan. About $100 million of that has been contributed by Kenneth G. Langone, the founder of Home Depot, and his wife, Elaine, for whom the medical school is named.

This policy, effective immediately, covers all current and future students of NYU School of Medicine. Currently, there are 93 first-year students, and another 350 students who have up to three years left before obtaining their degrees who have been affected by the full-tuition scholarship.