So apparently NYU has announced that their medical school will have free tuition to all of its students. They touted this as "improving diversity" as they anticipated it to remove (any and all) barriers to entry. One news station even described it as eliminating "merit based systems" from the equation. The announcement was met with thunderous applause.
They're hoping this policy will be adopted all across the country.
This worries me... Nothing in this world is free. You know that what you're doing has value because someone is willing to pay a price for it. Price tells us what we can and cannot do. When we remove incentives to put our time to something useful, we lose the valuable desire to do that useful something. When something of incredible value requires equally incredible dedication, it deserves the necessary price barrier so that only those dedicated to pursuing it will do so. Now we have young women spending their most prime years studying a service that many of them will abandon. We have the floodgates opened so that people who have no business attempting medicine will now waste their time, and the facility's resources, pursuing such degrees.
Simply making medicine itself "free" in the countries attempting socialized medicine has universally resulted in a tremendous disaster and very costly, incredibly slow medical care. And now they want to apply this same disaster to the study of medicine, too?
Someone tell me I'm dreaming, or that I missed something that makes this a-okay somehow... ~_~