March 28, 2024
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U of Illinois trustees approve new medical school

URBANA – University of Illinois trustees signed off on a plan Thursday to create a new engineering-based medical school at the Urbana-Champaign campus that will rely on a mix of private and public funds.

Administrators hope the school will establish the university's footprint in the emerging world of technology-based health care and provide a model for financing higher education in an era of dwindling government support.

"We are in a transformational period in the way that health care is delivered," university President Robert Easter, who backed the proposal, said in recommending the plan. "The emerging model calls for the integration of key disciplines in health care to a degree not imagined in the past."

Trustees didn't discuss the new school Thursday, but their unanimous approval sets off a series of steps that would see the first class of 25 enroll in 2017 or, if there are unexpected hurdles, 2018, Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise said. Approvals from the Illinois Board of Higher Education and accreditation would still be required, as well as hiring a dean and faculty.

By 2023-24, enrollment would hit about 200 a year.

Startup costs are expected to be about $100 million, with no new buildings needed.

Carle Health System in Urbana has agreed to provide $100 million over 10 years and plans to be an ongoing partner, but the new school will have to find much of its own ongoing funding, from the revenue it generates through inventions, tuition and donations.

Talk of donations led to questions in a trustees' committee meeting a day earlier from Trustee James Montgomery.

"When we talk about resources, we've got to look down the road to make sure that the plan does not strain state and university resources," he said.

Wise on Thursday said that the new medical school will be in search of its own, new funding rather than drawing away money now going elsewhere at the university.

"This is all about increasing the size of the pie. You go to new donors, you go to new corporations, you go to new foundations that we haven't worked with before," she said in an interview Thursday.

Easter said that eventually the funding formula could provide a model for other university ventures in a period of state budget cuts.

Gov. Bruce Rauner's proposed budget would cut the university's state appropriation by 31.5 percent, more than $200 million, about 3 percent of the school's $5.6 billion operating budget. Most university funds come from other sources, the largest being tuition.

The university will draw extensively on its College of Engineering, consistently ranked among the top 10 in the country, for the new medical school, Wise and others said. Faculty and students there already work in areas such as nanoscale biotechnologies and cell and tissue engineering that have yielded tiny wearable medical technology and miniature biological robots made of a mix of living tissue and 3d-printed materials.

The new medical school would be independent of the existing College of Medicine in Chicago but be complementary to it, administrators said Thursday.