In 1955, Albert Einstein College of Medicine was founded in the Bronx to welcome all students without restrictions. Professor emerita Ruth L. Gottesman’s recent $1 billion gift to the college now ensures that.
With the donation, the largest to any medical school in the country, all current fourth-year students will be reimbursed their spring 2024 semester tuition and, in August of this year, all students moving forward will receive free tuition at Albert Einstein. The numbers are somewhat mind-boggling: More than 100 students enter the school each year. According to Education Data Initiative, the average cost of a medical school degree in the United States is $218,792, with a yearly increase of $1,158.
“This donation radically revolutionizes our ability to continue attracting students who are committed to our mission, not just those who can afford it,” said Yaron Tomer, M.D., the Marilyn and Stanley Katz dean at Einstein. “Additionally, it will free up and lift our students, enabling them to pursue projects and ideas that might otherwise be prohibitive. We will be reminded of the legacy this historic gift represents each spring as we send another diverse class of physicians out across the Bronx and around the world to provide compassionate care and transform their communities.”
Gottesman, Ed.D., chair of the Einstein board of trustees and a Montefiore Health System board member, joined Einstein’s Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center (CERC) in 1968. At a time when learning problems were often unrecognized and misdiagnosed, she developed widely used screening, evaluation and treatment modalities that have helped tens of thousands of children. In 1992, she started the Adult Literacy Program at CERC, the first of its kind, which is still in operation. In 1998, she was named the founding director of the Emily Fisher Landau Center for the Treatment of Learning Disabilities (at CERC). Gottesman earned her bachelor’s degree at Barnard College and her master’s and doctoral degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is clinical professor emerita of pediatrics (developmental medicine) at Einstein.
This is not the first time she and her late husband, financier David Sanford “Sandy” Gottesman, made a substantial donation to Einstein. In 2008, David Gottesman donated $25 million to the college to found the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.
In making the $1 billion gift, Ruth Gottesman paid tribute to her husband, who died in 2022 at age 96 at their home in Rye:
“I am very thankful to…Sandy for leaving these funds in my care, and l feel blessed to be given the great privilege of making this gift to such a worthy cause.”
