The University of Central Florida's College of Medicine will welcome each student in its first class with $40,000 every year for four years.
"We are a brand new school, and we aspire to be among the best in the country, so we want to start off with the best possible faculty and the best possible students," said Dr. Deborah German, dean of the UCF College of Medicine and former associate dean of medical education at the Duke School of Medicine. "And by having such a scholarship program, we believe that some students who might not have been willing to try a new medical school, even one that aspires to be among the best, would be more likely to take a chance on us."
The first class of 40 students to attend UCF College of Medicine in 2009 will receive $20,000 in tuition scholarships and $20,000 for living expenses each year.
German said that when UFC approved the scholarship idea, community businesses helped the College of Medicine raise more than $7 million to establish the new school among the top in the nation.
UCF College of Medicine has preliminary accreditation and will not achieve full accreditation until its first class is in its fourth year. But Dan Scheirer, director of Duke's Office of Health and Professional Advising, said there are few downsides to attending the start-up UCF school, particularly for Florida residents.
"If you want to establish a medical school and get some top students, I think that's a good marketing technique to attract the top students from your state and perhaps even out of state," he said. "You select a medical school on several different factors, and rank is only one of those factors.... The demand for seats [in medical school] is so great, any increase in seats is going to be filled by the demand."
Tym Blanchard, a pre-med junior, said even the scholarship would not motivate him to apply to the new medical school.
"I would be going to a just-established college with hardly any reputation and still have to pay pretty much full tuition," he said. "That doesn't make any sense to me."
But German said she knows from personal experience that scholarships like UCF's attract qualified students-she graduated from Harvard Medical School but said she would not have been able to attend the noted university without a scholarship.
Duke's School of Medicine enrolls about 100 students every year, and Dr. Edward Buckley, interim vice dean for medical education at the School of Medicine, said 90 percent of students receive an average financial aid package of $48,000 a year. He noted that though Duke may lose some applicants concerned about financing medical school, he does not expect that students interested in Duke's curriculum will choose UCF instead.
"[The amount of aid we offer is] in the same ballpark as they are," Buckley said. "[If a student] really wanted the type of education that we offer, I think the actual financial issue would go by the wayside."
Duke has also begun to offer merit scholarships to 15 percent of incoming classes in addition to financial aid packages, Buckley said. Among top-tier medical schools, he noted that Duke students owe much less.
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