Medical Student Scholarships
Read about Toni Ramirez '08 MD'12, one of our Medical Student Scholarship recipients.
The mean cumulative educational debt for Alpert Medical School's Class of 2012 was $131,450. This figure, though approximately $45,000 less than the median educational debt of all private medical school graduates nationwide, is a substantial sum to repay. Alpert Medical School seeks to lower the debt burden placed on graduates by providing financial aid packages that contain larger scholarships. Increasing aid will:
- Support a pipeline of top-notch physicians by making a career in medicine—and a humanistic, patient-focused education at Alpert Medical School—more accessible to the most gifted students, regardless of financial status. At Alpert Medical School, scholarship funding is the least robust in the Ivy League and near the least robust among its peer schools. Additional funding will enable Brown to attract and educate the very best students.
- Help augment the physician workforce by enabling Alpert Medical School to support additional students. The aging population and influx of patients newly insured through the Affordable Care Act will deepen the nation's physician shortage. In response to the Association of American Medical Colleges' call to medical schools to help mitigate this shortage, Alpert Medical School is increasing its enrollment. The MD class of 2016 will expand to 120 students. Funding will support the additional financial aid demands of a 20% larger student body.
- Help mitigate physician shortages in primary care specialties by giving new graduates greater financial freedom to choose the best, not only the best-paying, specialty for them. The AAMC has predicted a physician shortage of 91,500 by 2020; almost half of those will be primary doctors. The proportion of medical students choosing to enter primary care has declined in the past 15 years, as the income gap between primary care doctors and specialists continues to widen. Specialists' annual income averages $100,000 more than for primary care doctors. Lower medical school debt will help encourage more to enter less lucrative specialties that simply do not have enough providers.
Support Medical Scholarship
Major giving opportunities to support medical students—as well as students in biology and public health—are listed here: http://biomed.brown.edu/adv/giving-opportunities/all.
