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| Black med school students pose at former slave quarters. |
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Two HBCUs --- Morgan State University and Xavier University of Louisiana--- have announced plans to open new medical schools in 2023 and 2025. The two new medical schools join Howard, Meharry, Morehouse, and Charles R. Drew, bringing the total number of Black medical schools up to six.
The new HBCU medical schools represent a significant development, given the small number of Black doctors in the United States. Even with six Black medical schools making up just 2.3 percent of the total number of medical schools in the U.S., HBCUs produced 9.8 percent of the Black medical school graduates in 2019, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. That number is down from 27 percent in 2002, before a wave of new medical school openings began, increasing the number of overall graduates.
Xavier and Morgan State are part of a wave of nine institutions over all that have announced plans to open medical colleges. The list includes Marist College in New York; Duquesne University in Pennsylvania; the University of California, Merced; and the University of Texas at Tyler, among others. Between 2001 and 2019, 29 medical college opened in the U.S., according to the American Association of Medical College’s count in early 2020.
The new HBCU medical schools represent a significant development nonetheless, given the small number of Black doctors in the United States. Despite making up just 2.3 percent of the total number of medical schools in the U.S., HBCUs produced 9.8 percent of the Black medical school graduates in 2019, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. That number is down from 27 percent in 2002, before a wave of new medical school openings began, increasing the number of overall graduates.
Efforts by several major predominantly white institutions, or PWIs, to recruit and graduate more Black students are also expected to increase the number of Black doctors over the next decade, which may also eventually improve the access to and quality of health care that Black people receive. Meanwhile, first-year enrollments in medical school by Black students in the 2021–22 academic year rose by 21 percent, from 2,117 to 2,562, compared to the previous year, according to the AAMC.
Still not enough
Those positive signs do little to diminish the many other challenges that remain in terms of increasing the number of Black doctors. A 2015 report by the National Institutes of Health estimated an impending shortage of 33,000 primary care physicians by 2035. Black medical educators point out that Black communities will bear the brunt of those shortages.
“While we can be excited and happy, as I am, that HBCUs with the capacity to do so are starting [medical schools], we cannot let up the pressure on the existing medical schools in doing a better job in training a diverse student body,” said James Hildreth, president of historically Black Meharry Medical College in Tennessee.
“There’s no way in the world—if Morgan starts a school, if Xavier starts a school—that is still not going to provide the number of diverse medical trainees that we need,” Hildreth said. “The other existing schools have to do a better job. That means changing how they evaluate students for admittance, but also paying more attention to the pipelines they draw the students from.”
“The med schools do not drive the pipelines themselves,” said Reynold Verret, a biochemist and immunologist, and president of Xavier. “It’s the four-year colleges, and the four-year colleges don’t drive those pipelines, either. It’s K-through-12.”
“The overreliance on HBCUs as feeders of Black med students is an indication that obstacles exist not only at the admissions level but in the pipeline to, through and out of medical school,” Verrett added.
Florida stifles FAMU's ambition
FAMU with its vast array of programs in the health sciences --- pharmacy, nursing, allied health, biology, chemistry, and public health--- has long been looking to take that next logical step in addressing the Florida's, and the nation's, low number of minority health professionals however the state of Florida has NOT been a willing partner.
FAMU's existing health programs have been historically underfunded by the state making it hard to recruit and retain high-quality faculty, and even match the facilities of its newer and more well funded siblings -- UCF, FAU, FIU who have each opened med schools in the past 20 years, and expanded their nursing programs to meet critical state needs. While FAMU's nursing program, the state's oldest, has been limited to admitting on 50 students a semester because of low funding and staffing shortages.
Even though the FAMU Pharmacy School has been operating in Crestview, FL, for a decade, the school must still must have its $1.5 million budget approved by the Legislature each year.
When FAMU explored the possibility of opening a new dental school in 2009, Florida's political power structure worked behind the scenes and even out front to shot the idea down.
FAMU's proposal to open a dental school had garnered the support of the City of Tallahassee and Leon County who both offered up $10 million to help start the school, and Tallahassee Memorial Hospital even offered to house the new school. The proposal even earned a favorable editorial from the Florida Times-Union.
And, in a rare show of support FSU agreed to work with FAMU in standing up a new dental school.
But then Governor Rick Scott and his Board of Governor's wanted no part of the new school, despite the fact that the new school would have created more than 1,000 new jobs across the panhandle.