About 5 percent of students who apply to the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine are accepted each year, making admissions “extraordinarily competitive.”
Last year, nearly 5,000 applications were sent in, but between all three campuses, 240 spots were available to accept students. Enrollment numbers are static because the college is only accredited to have so many students.
The Athens campus holds the bulk of students, whereas Cleveland and Dublin both instruct 50 students per year. In 2019, the Dublin campus will increase the enrollment cap to 60 students.
“Not only have the number of students gone up over the years, but the quality of students has just continued to skyrocket,” Professor and Dean Emeritus John Brose said.
Class sizes across the Dublin and Cleveland campuses have increased in the past two years since the Dublin campus opened about three years ago and the Cleveland campus opened about two years ago. But the Athens campus has maintained enrollment of about 140 students for the past four years.
“While I was dean, we got together a bunch of people and did a study on how many students that we could train down here and do a wonderful job doing it,” Brose said. “We determined that we could ratchet that up over a period of a couple years to 140 and so we did that, but at the same time we determined that going above 140 would be extremely difficult down here considering our facilities and considering our faculty size.”
Because the college’s mission is to maintain quality, rejecting applications prevents HCOM from expanding beyond what its amenities and faculty can handle.
In August 2016, the Board of Trustees approved construction of the Union Street Green. That will move HCOM from Grosvenor Hall to a new building on Union Street. Construction of that facility is expected to begin in 2018 and is slated to cost $65 million overall.
“I don’t know that having a new building is going to allow more students here … but it’s possible,” Brose said. “One of my thought processes when I established the Dublin and Cleveland campuses was that I realized the only way we were really going to expand to a significant degree was to expand outwards, outside of Athens.”
The immediate goal, however, is not to bring more medical students to Athens. Instead, HCOM is working to increase the scope of the three campuses through further collaboration with clinical partners.
Since opening the Dublin and Cleveland campuses, HCOM has added 36 faculty members, excluding clinical faculty, who instruct third- and fourth-year students through the college’s statewide network of teaching hospitals.
“We’ve got an incredibly robust number of adjunct faculty all throughout our clinical campuses,” Associate Dean John Schriner said. “We have about 4,000 preceptors, which are Group IV faculty around the state, so we’ve got a very robust faculty around the state to deliver our clinical training.”
Those instructors play a dual role of being a teacher and a mentor; they individually guide medical students through early clinical contact and training.
The Dublin campus is affiliated with OhioHealth, and the Cleveland campus is affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic, but the two campuses also work with regional partners.
When developing the Cleveland and Dublin campuses, HCOM wanted to make sure that there was “great connectivity” for an array of ventures, Schriner said. Through videoconferencing technology, the college is able to stay connected across three campuses and instantly deliver teaching materials to students.
“Through our videoconferencing technology, our students have greater access than ever before to physicians and other health care experts practicing in central and northeast Ohio,” HCOM spokeswoman Karoline Lane said in an email. “It’s much easier for the excellent physicians from these great health care systems to teach from Dublin and Cleveland, and our students at all campuses benefit from their instruction.”
