Kaiser Permanente, the California-based health system that is preparing to open one of the few American medical schools not connected to a university, was set to announce Tuesday that it would waive tuition for every student in its first five graduating classes.

Kaiser Permanente, which has its own hospitals, clinics, doctors and insurance plan, is following the New York University School of Medicine, which announced last year that it would eliminate tuition for all current and future students. Like N.Y.U., Kaiser’s main goal is to keep students from forgoing lower-paying specialties like family medicine because of crushing debt, or foreclosing the option of medical school altogether because of the cost.

“Even middle-class families are finding medical school hard to pay for,” said Mark Schuster, the founding dean and chief executive of the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. “We’re going to see how this plays out and learn from it.”

He said the school would start accepting applications in June and open in Pasadena in the summer of 2020. The annual tuition will be about $55,000, he said, adding that while it was not planning to cover tuition beyond the first five classes, it would provide “very generous financial aid” based on need after that.