New UNC System President Thomas Ross is looking for ways to eliminate “unneccessary duplication” among UNC programs, reports the News & Observer.
Good. And it’s about time.
Here’s a no-brainer for the president’s list: The forthcoming dental school at East Carolina University. As the Pope Center’s Duke Cheston notes in this Carolina Journal column, “The school will cost nearly $100 million to build, with an additional $11.5 million in recurring funds every year from state taxpayers.”
It’s not at all clear the school could meet its stated purpose: producing dentists who will see more patients in the state’s remote rural areas. A big reason some areas are “underserved,” Cheston notes, is that more and more dentists have stopped seeing Medicaid patients due to cuts in Medicaid payments to practitioners. A new dental school in Greenville would do nothing to change that arithmetic.
Moreover, Cheston writes, in 2005 the American Dental Association “calculated that dental schools tend to increase their economic efficiency as enrollment rises to around 1,300 students. But ECU?s new dental school is expected to enroll 50 students per class (200 students total when at capacity) and UNC-Chapel Hill?s dental school is planning to increase enrollment to 100 students per class (400 total). If the ADA is correct, we are wasting millions by building a new low-capacity school when it would be prudent to increase the capacity of the existing one.”
It’s easiest to get rid of an unnecessary government program before it becomes established and entrenched. Yes, there’s a hole in the ground in Greenville where the dental school is supposed to eventually reside. But it’s quicker and cheaper to fill in that hole, reassign the students accepted at ECU to Chapel Hill, and shut down a needless and redundant drain on the state treasury before it gets started.
