An anonymous $50M gift will cover some tuition for medical lab students at University of Washington

SEATTLE (AP) — An anonymous donation expected to exceed $50 million is helping cover tuition costs for medical laboratory science students at the University of Washington for the next half-century.

The dean of the university’s School of Medicine, Dr. Tim Dellit, made the surprise announcement Monday to about 30 grateful undergrads, who will each see two quarters’ worth of tuition covered for their senior-year clinical rotations, The Seattle Times reported.

“I’m really shocked,” said Jasmine Wertz, eyes filling with tears. “Overwhelmed. Extremely grateful.”

Students in the program are trained to perform clinical lab tests on patient samples, which are used to help diagnose, treat and prevent disease and other conditions. Their clinical rotations are so time-consuming that it’s hard to hold down part-time jobs during them.

The gift is the latest in a series of recent donations helping pay for college around the country. Last year, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York received a $1 billion donation from Ruth Gottesman, a former professor and the widow of a Wall Street investor, making tuition there free.

Most medical students at Johns Hopkins University no longer pay tuition thanks to a $1 billion gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

In September at Marshall University in West Virginia, President Brad Smith and his wife, Alys Smith, announced a $50 million gift to promote a program aimed at eliminating student debt, in part by covering tuition for West Virginia students with family income of $65,000 or less.

The University of Washington announcement Monday is worth about $8,000 to $10,000 per student, said UW Medicine spokesperson Susan Gregg. The program will also be able to expand from 70 to 100 students over the next 10 years.

The donor, from Washington state, wishes to remain anonymous, but “had a relationship with this program,” Gregg said. The donor is also a fan of the local burger chain Dick’s, and burgers were piled high atop platters as the students celebrated.

The field of medical laboratory services has faced increasing demand and an aging workforce in Washington, according to UW Medicine. Those factors have resulted in an “urgent need to grow the pipeline of highly skilled clinical laboratory professionals,” the health care system said in a news release.

“You are the glue, in many ways, of our entire health system,” Dellit told the students. “You are the unsung heroes. You work behind the scenes that allow all of the health care machinery to work.”