Mining the Mission | An Ivy Takes Its Head Out of Its Monied Sand

Nonprofit and public interest lawyers aren’t the only badly needed professionals who leave school struggling under a large debt load and facing insufficient salaries to ease the burden. Physicians who graduate med school and want to enter general practice or primary care find that salaries leg behind those of such high-profile specialties as plastic surgery and dermatology.

Enter Harvard Medical School, which took a page from Harvard Law’s playbook last week and announced that it would "reduce the cost of a four-year medical education by as much as $50,000 for families with an income of $120,000 or less," according to the Boston Globe.

"Minimizing debt is also essential for eliminating a potential barrier for students in making career choices," said Jules Dienstag, the school’s dean of medical education. "This way students will not have to take debt into account or won’t feel pressured to enter into higher-paying specialties after graduation. They can go into whatever field it is that inspired them to study medicine."

The Ivy League gets crapped on by a lot of pundits for being elite schools packed with limousine liberals who have no clue how real people live. Some of that reputation is deserved. But as Harvard is showing, some universities are doing more than a lot of people think. Here’s hoping more schools follow the Crimson’s lead. | 501(c)

Tags: Harvard Medical School, tuition relief