Futures for Sale

To finance their education, needy medical students have long peddled everything from magazine subscriptions to their own blood. Now, two students at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit are suggesting that prospective doctors sell a more valuable commodity--a piece of their future. Aware that many small towns need doctors, particularly general practitioners, Sol Edelstein, 24, and Douglas Jackson, 26, are offering in effect to indenture themselves to any community that is willing to pay the cost of their medical education.

Encouraging Response. Edelstein, president of Wayne State's medical student council, and Jackson, student-faculty council representative, got the idea last fall when Belding, Mich., was about to lose its only doctor. The community sent a representative to a meeting of the state medical society and offered to pay a student's way through medical school if he would agree to come and work in Belding. Figuring that other towns might be equally desperate for doctors, Edelstein and Jackson wrote to 134 communities to suggest similar arrangements.

Under their proposal, which they stress is open to negotiation, the town would advance a medical student $2,000 a year at 3% interest for four years, provide and equip an office and guarantee a reasonable income once a practice is established. In turn, the student would repay the loan within three years of completing internship and military service, and would pledge to serve in the town as a general practitioner for at least a year. If the arrangement worked well, the students believe, the young doctors would stay for much longer.

"The obligation to serve the designated time in the community," says Edelstein, "would be a moral instead of a legal one." But he suggests that the pledge could be given some extra force by a clause providing for a higher interest rate or other penalty should a doctor default on his promise to remain in the town.

Response to the proposal has been encouraging. The Michigan Medical Society's Education Commission says that it will recommend that its parent group guarantee all loans made to state medical students. Twenty Michigan communities have answered the original letter, and two--Niles and Muskegon --have sent representatives to Wayne State for student interviews. About 100 students have declared themselves available. Their interest in the program is easy to comprehend. Since 1966, total federal aid to Wayne State medical students has dropped from $365,000 to $81,400. Tuition for state residents, which was only $750 five years ago, has increased to $1,150--and even that much is less than half the cost at many private universities.

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