New state med schools can finance their bailout

[CyberBull]

Recent developments could really affect the USF and the other two state medical schools. The frustrating thing about this situation is that USF is in dire need of upgrading their medical school facilities. However instead of  the state taking an already very good medical school and making it better, it decided to add two more medical schools which will further stretch and already thin budget. IT will be VERY interesting to see how this shakes out..

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New state med schools can finance their bailout

Palm Beach Post Editorial

Friday, August 17, 2007

Florida's university system just got another unfavorable prognosis: Florida International University and the University of Central Florida are tens of millions of dollars short on what it will take to complete their medical schools that, combined, were supposed to cost $500 million.

The Board of Governors mistakenly approved the schools last year. Since then, FIU and UCF say, technology and class-size accreditation standards have led to an additional $86 million in start-up expenses. Because the med schools already are hiring faculty toward projected fall 2009 openings, the suggestion is that the state must ante up more or risk having unaccredited schools.

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Here's another idea: The universities should raise the money. When lobbying for these unneeded programs, FIU and UCF claimed that deep-pocket supporters would supplement what the state couldn't, or wouldn't. But the state shouldn't, not with Gov. Crist having vetoed an overall tuition increase and the system facing statewide cuts.

In contrast to the FIU and UCF debacles is Florida Atlantic University's well-conceived, economical partnership with the University of Miami. Rather than attend UM for their third and fourth years of training, FAU's 32 medical students, starting this month, will receive all their training at FAU's Boca Raton campus. Expansion of the two-year program also brought Boca Community Hospital on board for a new $650 million teaching hospital on land leased from FAU.

Creating two start-from-scratch medical schools, with no guarantee that the graduates would stay in Florida, was a waste of state money. These were the kinds of projects that the Board of Regents would have rejected. The regents based decisions on a statewide perspective. But former Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature abolished the regents in 2001.

Since then - as The Post warned would happen - it's been every university for itself, depending on who has power in Tallahassee that year. Influential lawmakers with Florida State University ties gave FSU an unneeded medical school. They established two redundant law schools at FIU and Florida A&M University. Each university wants to be a "major" university, and that will produce mediocrity, not excellence.

The Board of Governors, which replaced the regents, should have rejected the additional medical schools. Instead, the board again allowed itself to legitimize the power of clout over the needs of the system and the taxpayers. The predictable inflation has begun, with FIU and UCF calling it unexpected. In fact, it was more like higher education malpractice. Those universities wanted their medical schools. Those universities should find the money.

[outrunner]

UCF and FIU get a med school.

USF and UF get to bite the bullet.

What would be worse, having 3 mediocre med schools and 2 bad ones, or having 3 good med schools with 2 shut down ones?