Dive Brief:
- Former university president Dr. Richard A. Skinner acknowledges much of the attention in higher education is on “constraints and reductions,” but he points to medical schools as a growth sector.
- For University Business, Skinner writes that projected physician shortages are contributing to demand, as well as the need for biomedical research to achieve treatment advances.
- Even though medical schools are extremely expensive — to attend and to run — Texas has taken the lead, opening three new medicine-related schools since 2009, joining California at the top of the distribution with 27 million people and nine medical schools.
Dive Insight:
Texas’ growth in medical schools tied into 2009 legislation that identified seven public universities as emerging research universities that would have access to additional state funding if they join the ranks of Tier One research institutions. Skinner says California and Texas have large populations that, in part, explain their high number of medical schools (California has 12), but the growth in demand for doctors as well as the number of med schools is reflected nationwide. The University of Illinois, for example, is searching for leadership for its soon-to-open engineering-based medical school, the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.