A BARGAIN EDUCATION

By Jon Nalick

 

In 1937, Francis Guinney typed up a list of expenses from eight years of medical education at USC and regarded the bottom line with no special delight.

After all, $3,400.42 was a great deal of money at a time when a car could be purchased for $100. But after recently reviewing the note and comparing his educational costs with today's equivalent, the retired anesthesiologist agreed he got an impressive deal.

The cost of an equivalent medical education today-including tuition, fees, books and lab equipment-would run about $276,000.

"I wasn't particularly impressed at the time, but obviously it was a bargain," says Guinney, whose last name is pronounced "gih-NAY."

Even after adjusting for inflation, Guinney paid only about one-eighth what a medical student today would expect to pay. Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that his 1937 education expenses are the equivalent of $34,850 in 1994 dollars-the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Guinney, 83, said he wasn't surprised at the increase in the cost of medical education, especially considering the changes in technology, the expansion of the campus and the addition of permanent faculty.

"At that time they didn't have so many full-time professors. We had practicing physicians as volunteer instructors. We didn't even have a medical school so we spent the first year and a half in the undergraduate science building," he says.

Guinney's father paid the bill for his son's education, but during the Depression "it wasn't easy for him to pay the $400-some dollars a year that tuition cost.

"His salary at a Cadillac agency in town had been cut. Before the Depression he was making $1,000 a month. That went down to $250 a month. As I was going through medical school, I paid for a microscope and the Cecil Textbook of Medicine; everything else, he paid for," Guinney says.

Guinney says he kept the note with his medical school expenses out of habit because, "I'm an accountant by heart so figures interest me."

For years the note remained filed in his personal belongings under "B" for the "black book" that contained it. After he reviewed the list, he says, "Considering the way I've been able to earn a living and such, yes, I got a bargain."