I’m willing to admit that no two schools have precisely the same expenses: real estate costs more at N

Schools withdraw so much that despite scholarships and cash payments, each year a class of new doctors graduates with a total of $2

But education does have a cost. Somewhere, in some office, an actual person is paying actual bills: desks cost concrete amounts of money, electricity costs a known number of dollars, faculty are paid real money in exchange for real services, etc. The cost of educating a medical student ought to be concrete and countable because it is paid for with concrete, countable dollars.

Y.U. than it does at the University of North Dakota; group-based curricula cost more than lecture-based curricula. But the fact that tuition ranges from $16,000 to $93,000 per year has to be explained by more than just a real estate market or an educational philosophy. It sounds like a question for an economist.

I call Amitabh Chandra, the director of health policy research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

Chandra explains that, in any industry-and medicine is no different-the price of the service depends on the cost of producing the service.

But! Chandra emphasizes, But it also reflects the willingness to pay for that service. Tuition is part of a basic supply-demand market equilibrium: each school sets its price tag to maximize the amount its officials they advance cash loan payday Maryland think they can get for their product.

Even if the cost were zero, it is not the case that medical student tuition would be zero. Chandra continues, It would be high because people’s willingness to pay for the degree is high…. That’s the harsh economics of pricing.

In addition to the LCME, I tell Chandra that I also spoke with a representative from the American Association of Medical Colleges who, it appeared, was convinced that medical school finances were impenetrably opaque, that the marginal cost of educating one medical student was in some weird, Borgesian way, uncountable.

Chandra stops me, reminding me that the numbers are all there (i.e., someone pays the bills), but most schools simply don’t spend the effort to sort out their cost structure.

I think it should. One of the reasons that health care is 20 percent of our GDP is that nobody knows their cost structure and yet everybody thinks that they’re losing money somehow. I think this is the key irresponsibility at the heart of medicine: the inability and unwillingness to learn one’s underlying cost.

Tuition is skyrocketing because college kids keep lining up to pay whatever price the schools set. The more kids line up, the higher the price.

Each year, only 41 percent of applicants are accepted into medical school. Because demand outstrips supply, medical schools have the economic upper hand and, because lenders invariably approve loans to cover tuition, schools can effectively set the price of tuition to be whatever they want. College kids who don’t like it need not apply-somewhere in the remaining 59 percent, an applicant is willing to pay.

So if a college kid wants to become a doctor, she is forced to give her medical school carte blanche. Schools withdraw.

6 billion in loans, with a median student debt of $194,000. And no one-not even the regulator tasked with protecting students-can say where this money goes.

It dawns on me that tuition is easy money. If you’re dean of a medical school staring at a deficit, withdrawing progressively larger sums of money from a yet-unknown student is easier than having an uncomfortable conversation with your faculty.

Grossman is a true anomaly. When he became dean/CEO, N.Y.U. Langone Health was running a $150 million annual deficit; hardly a time to build an endowment to fund a $25 million tuition giveaway. Yet, as a self-identified underdog, he wanted to spare his fellow underdog medical students from shouldering N.Y.U.’s budget problems.