BYU Med

My hope is that they teach HEALTH, and how to keep it, rather than pills and how to take them.

My first whimsical thought about “research in area of strategic importance to the Church” was the trans-humanists we used to hear from.

My second thought was a past case of strategic medical teaching of importance to the Church. My late wife’s uncle was a missionary in Vietnam, pulled out with the rest a few weeks before Saigon fell. A couple decades later he was a physician making repeated trips to Vietnam to teach techniques to doctors and nurses, and letting Salt Lake know about conditions in the country. A couple more decades later he and his wife were called to lead the Church’s humanitarian services in Vietnam, and some months into that work the Vietnam Hanoi Mission was organized and he was called to preside it. I can imagine a BYU medical school facilitating appreciated connection of this sort with many nations of the world.

One thing BYU is known for is very low tuition, great value for your money. I wonder what tuition and medical school debt will be like for future doctors educated at the future BYU Russell M. Nelson School of Medicine. My guess is that half of them will be from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and they will go back home debt-free.

Deseret News reports that the U. of Utah medical school has 2,000 applicants for 125 slots. BYU’s tuition for a year of undergraduate education is $6,688 and for the law school a year is $15,528. Those are the prices for Latter-day Saints, and for the unbaptized the price is double. At the U. of Utah a year of tuition for Utah residents is $16,706 for undergraduates, $35,328 for law students, and $47,820 for medical students. For non-residents their tuition price is more than double. Applying the 2.3 ratio between the law schools would put a year’s tuition at BYU medical school at $21,800.

Three weeks ago Johns Hopkins University announced the latest major donation by Michael Bloomberg to his alma mater. From Washington Post: “A $1 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University from billionaire Mike Bloomberg will make medical school free for most students and increase financial aid for those enrolled in nursing, public health and other graduate programs. [ . . . ] Starting this fall, Johns Hopkins will offer medical students free tuition — normally about $65,000 a year for four years — if their families earn less than $300,000 a year. Students from families earning up to $175,000 a year will have living expenses and fees covered as well. ‘It’s a full-ride scholarship,’ Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels said. ‘We see that as a very significant move to ensure that medical education is available to the best and brightest across the country.'”

[ . . . ]

“The gift announced Monday is not the first aimed at erasing medical-school tuition costs for students. Earlier this year, a billion-dollar donation to Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York from Ruth Gottesman, the chair of its board of trustees, enabled the school to announce to cheers that fourth-year students would be reimbursed for their spring tuition and that in the future, tuition would be free. New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine announced in 2018 that it would give full-tuition scholarships to all students regardless of financial need, and a $200 million donation last summer ensured that NYU’s second medical school, NYU Grossman Long Island School of Medicine, will be tuition-free in perpetuity.”

If the BYU medical school has 500 students, $22,000 annual tuition from each would amount to $11 million a year. Considering the billions of dollars the Church will spend on this medical school through its first decade, it is easy to imagine the $100 million in tuition being forgone if the Church feels there is value in doing that. Even with $22,000 annual tution, the future doctors will carry much lower debt than their peers educated at other schools.

Areas of strategic concern for the church:
– Influence on Developing world, less wealthy nations
– Abortion, transgender surgeries (not being held captive their proponents)
– Body damagaging substances in the environment that’s contributed to decling fertility rates, mental health issues, etc.
– Keeping young families who will go out into the world at other schools to study less in crushing debt.

@Suter — BYU departments for “professional” majors are already captive to the proponents you describe, and medicine will be the same. If a job requires a degree plus a certification exam, the certification body threatens to de-certify BYU grads unless that department toes the world’s line. If BYU were to “stand up for what’s right” then future law, teaching, nursing and allied health graduates would be legally banned from working in those professions. In the United States or other Western nations, of course; they’d have no problem getting work in Nigeria or Russia or China.