An increase in first-year class size is among the many changes in store for the Alpert Medical School, coinciding with the third year of the Med School opening its doors to students through a standard admission route.
A strategic planning working group for the Med School appointed in September by Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 recommended in its December report that a new medical education building planned for the Med School should be designed to accommodate up to 125 students per class in the future.
Eli Adashi, dean of medicine and biological sciences, who chaired the working group, told The Herald, "125 is a more distant goal." The largest class size that the Med School is currently approved for by its accrediting body - and the largest size administrators are currently considering - is 108 students, Adashi said. Ninety-two students now comprise the first-year class.
The growth of the Med School is part of a larger trend - there has been a "national call to expand the ranks of medical school student bodies by up to 30 percent from the (American Association of Medical Colleges) to correct a projected shortage of physicians," Adashi said.
"We don't want the school to be too big - don't want to be a factory - or too small - need critical mass to have an impact. And right now we're closer to too small," said Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to the president.
The administration is aiming to have a 96-member first-year class this fall, said Philip Gruppuso, associate dean of medicine for medical education.
That size is only four students larger than the current first-year class but 12 greater than the intended size for this year. "The aim this year was to have 84 students in the current first-year class, but the Med School had a higher yield from standard-admissions-route students than expected," Gruppuso said.
The first year the Med School began recruiting students through normal admission channels was 2005. Previously, medical students only came to Brown through the Program in Liberal Medical Education - an eight-year program that combines an undergraduate education at Brown with the M.D. program - or other special channels.
"We're only on the third admissions cycle. First and second time around, thousands of people were applying for 10 open application spots," said Neel Shah '04 MD'08, president of the Medical Student Senate. "There were rumors of people not coming to the interview because they knew they had such low chances."
Gruppuso said he believes a 96-student first-year class is the largest the Med School can currently accommodate.
The major obstacle to further immediate growth is space in the Bio-Medical Center, Gruppuso said. Other concerns include the size of the anatomy lab and donations of enough cadavers, as well as having enough small-group leaders in the pre-clinical curriculum and enough clerkship spots - particularly in family medicine and internal medicine - in the clinical years.
Some students say increasing the class size makes sense. "Brown has excess capacity - way more clinical faculty members than students. Many, many times more the amount," Shah said.
Even with next year's class-size expansion, the number of slots available to students entering through the standard admission route for the incoming first-year class will fall slightly, to the high 20s from the current 33. That reduction, Gruppuso said, is due to an unusually large PLME class of 55 students. The current first-year Med School class has 48 PLME students enrolled.
The decision three years ago to open the Med School to students through the standard admission process and the current plan to increase the class size were "in some sense separate discussions," Spies said. "We don't want to reduce the number of PLME students."
The projected number of PLME students for the Med School's class of 2012 is 50, and the projected number of students to be admitted from the standard admission route is 35 to 40, Gruppuso said.
"We're not doing away with the PLME program. We can do both," said John Deeley, executive dean for administration for the Division of Biology and Medicine.
While admitting that the introduction of the standard admission program was designed to boost the visibility of the Med School, administrators and students alike have emphasized the increased diversity of backgrounds and ideas brought to the Med School class by students coming from the standard admission channel. "Diversity of perspective is almost always valuable," Spies said.
"A lot of places didn't even know Brown had a Med School. Opening up admissions has certainly made Brown a lot more visible and was good for strategic reasons," Shah said.
