Spring is always a momentous time at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, as we honor graduating medical students and celebrate a remarkable milestone—earned through years of dedication, hard work, and sacrifice. And yet, this season also reminds us that the path to a career in medicine is steep and filled with financial barriers. While 2025’s graduating class will strengthen the ranks of the profession, America’s need for doctors remains pressing.
One significant challenge in the American healthcare system is the heavy debt burden medical school graduates face, which deters many potential doctors from entering the field. Beyond debt, prospective students must weigh the opportunity cost of spending four years in medical school after earning their undergraduate degrees, delaying their ability to begin working.
Bold solutions are essential to address these significant obstacles for the next generation. Over the past five years, NYU Grossman School of Medicine has worked to become an innovator in medical education. We were among the first to establish a tuition-free pathway to an MD under a streamlined but still comprehensive program that takes just three years. Several of our peers have adopted tuition-free programs of their own over the past year and we hope others will continue to innovate.
The average doctor in the U.S. leaves medical school after four years owing in excess of $200,000, and nearly one out of every four graduates has $300,000 or more in educational debt. These realities can have broader implications, with some studies showing that financial stress impacts the mental health of those caring for patients and influences their specialty career choices. Financial burdens of this magnitude cannot continue if we want to attract the best future doctors from all walks of life.
At the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, we have seen the impact of this debt firsthand. That’s why we decided it was a moral imperative to find ways to drive down debt for our medical students and get them out into the workforce and earning a paycheck sooner. For more than a decade, we have been working to address student debt. First, by innovating and accelerating our MD curriculum to three years and then, thanks to exceptional support from Kenneth G. Langone, Board Chair of NYU Langone Health, and his wife, Elaine, as well as other donors, we were able to offer tuition-free medical education to all students.
Our tuition-free initiative was driven first and foremost by our desire to address the progressively increasing medical educational debt incurred by students across the country. Our tuition-free model is open to all students, regardless of income, because every aspiring doctor deserves to focus on patient care, not debt. Medical education is expensive, and even students from privileged backgrounds often incur debt. By removing financial barriers, we ensure that all students can enter the field with a singular focus on becoming great doctors—regardless of their family’s financial means. Great doctors come from diverse backgrounds and are equipped to care for patients from all walks of life. Patients deserve the very best doctors, whether from poor, middle-class, or wealthy backgrounds.
We also recognize that if we are to truly lower the financial barrier to entering the medical field, we need to enable our students to become physicians after three rather than four years. That’s why we became the first nationally-ranked academic medical center to offer an accelerated three-year MD pathway. Our program allows students to earn their MD degree more quickly and at a significantly reduced cost. This means that our students save all the costs of the fourth year and start earning an additional year of salary a year earlier, all while increasing their availability to see patients at a time of physician shortage. Students of our accelerated program maintain the excellence we expect of our graduates. In fact, a recent study published by NYU Langone researchers in Academic Medicine found that our three-year MD students performed as well or better than their counterparts in four-year programs. Based on this success of the accelerated pathway, we now offer all students the possibility of graduation in three years.
We began offering this innovative three-year curriculum at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in Manhattan in 2013 and then, in 2019, at the NYU Grossman Long Island School of Medicine, which was also launched as the first primary care-only medical school in the country. We are proud that this year, we graduated nearly 120 new doctors across our Manhattan and Long Island campuses.
Since we began our tuition-free and three-year MD programs, we have witnessed a dramatic positive impact on the lives of our students. The vast majority of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine three-year MD program graduates – 83% in 2024 – had no medical educational debt whatsoever, a figure far better than the national average of 37%. For our three-year MD graduates with medical educational debt, their average medical educational debt level is a little over $52,000, a fraction of the national average of $200,000. Reducing debt allows students to pursue their ideal specialties and enter the workforce sooner, whether that be in primary care fields, specialty fields, or medical research.
Among this year’s graduates is Emily Johnson, who grew up in a Wisconsin town of fewer than 500 people. For her, NYU’s full-tuition scholarship made medical school possible. “I’m going into pediatrics, which is one of the less compensated specialties in medicine,” she recently shared, “but I feel freer to pursue it knowing I have hundreds of thousands of dollars less debt to repay.”
Decreasing the debt and duration of medical education brings the physician workforce to patients earlier without sacrificing quality. We have the roadmap, proof of success, and examples from other forward-thinking institutions. We now call on the academic medical community to build on these innovations for the benefit of public health. It’s time to innovate medical education for all.
Dr. Abramson is Executive Vice President of NYU Langone Health and Vice Dean for Education, Faculty and Academic Affairs at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine; and Dr. Rivera is Associate Dean for Admissions and Financial Aid at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
