Long discouraged, for-profit medical education has established a renewed foothold in the US.
More than 100 years ago, the influential Flexner Report on medical education decried the then-prevalent model of for-profit medical education, leading to its complete disappearance from the United States for decades. But just recently, for-profit medical education has returned, note three Brown University scholars in a new JAMA article that considers what the revival might mean.
“It’s not so much that we’re in favor of it,” says Phil Gruppuso, MD, professor of pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School and former associate dean for medical education. “We are merely documenting that it’s happening. We hope that it can make a positive contribution since it’s going to happen.”
The turning point came in 1996 when antitrust litigation against the American Bar Association forced it to accredit for-profit law schools, wrote co-authors Gruppuso; Eli Adashi, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and former dean of medicine and biological sciences; and Gopika Krishna ’13 MD’17.
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