WAS UTRGV MEDICAL SCHOOL REALLY FOR LOCAL STUDENTS?

By Juan Montoya

It was hailed as the answer to address the historically medically under-served population in the Rio Grande and who could be against that?

Advocates of the establishment of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Medical School in Edinburg painted a picture of local RGV students entering the medical school, undergoing the rigorous instruction to become doctors, emerge on the other side in four years, complete a residency somewhere, and come back to the valley to address the doctor shortage here.

It was a good sell.

In May 2015, the Texas Legislature included close to $100 million for University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, the UT-RGV Regional Academic Health Center Medical Research Division.

McAllen donated the land, and the building for the school's Biomedical Research building – located on Doctors Hospital At Renaissance Health’s South Campus – was leased to UTRGV by DHR, a Medical Group Practice located in Edinburg, and DHR Real Estate Management, L.L.C.

In 2018, Harlingen donated around 35 acres located in the city towards a new institute of neurosciences and other medical related facilities. The South Texas Medical Foundation (STMF) donated the land to the university  for the development of an institute of neurosciences.

Then, in February 2020, it received a $38 million gift from the Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation, the largest single donation in the history of higher education in South Texas.

Guy Bailey, UTRGV president, thanked the Legacy Foundation for its generous donation.

“I’ve never been at a university where I’ve had a better partner than the Legacy Foundation,” Bailey said. “I want to thank you so much for this partnership.”

The VBLF had already gifted UTRGV $15 million three years ago to help establish the Institute of Neurosciences, currently under construction in Harlingen. There was even talk of a multi-county hospital tax district.

But alas, that idyllic and warm, fuzzy picture of the med school churning out local graduates has turned out much different.

Medical schools – any medical school – whether here, in Matamoros, or the Virgin Islands – is a magnet for students who want to be come doctors and will travel there, move in-state years ahead to establish residency, and then engage in a highly competitive battle to be one of the lucky applicants to be admitted to a class.

It happened here, too.

And the picture of the UTRGV Med School churning out doctors natives of the Rio Grande Valley and graduates of its high schools has become a fading illusion.

And despite the front page media coverage of that illusion: two identical headlines in AIM Media's valley newspapers screaming "Answering the Call," (one May 17 another July 6), it fudges the fact that local students make up a very minuscule part of the student body.

(Algo es algo, we agree. But as usual, the goods were oversold and claims were inflated by local politicians, not an infrequent occurrence here.)

In fact, the articles identify less than five graduates who can be said to have grown up in the RGV, attended high school here, or returned from elsewhere to attend the medical school. One is the daughter of Filipino parents who came here to work as nurses in local hospitals.

There were 55 students admitted in 2016 to the UTRGV Med school in the first class that just graduated this year. Of those, 39 graduated, the majority from outside the Valley. And if you make an information request to try to ascertain their residence before they were admitted, UTRGV will overwhelm you with information that make it seem like there are many local students attending the school.

The numbers and graphs tell you, for example, that of the 55 candidates who entered in the first class in 2016, 27 were male, 28 female, 21 were Hispanic or Latino, 15 were white, nine were Asian, and six were Black or African American. But don't be fooled. Hispanic could mean Mexican, Puerto Rican, Spanish, Venezuelan, or any other country or state, not necessarily from the Rio Grande Valley.

Residency of students after the first class is harder to determine. The 61-member class of 2019 may include people who came here after the school opened and established residency before applying. 

There is absolutely no information whether the 21 Hispanic or Latino students who entered the med school in that first class grew up and attended high schools in the Rio Grande Valley.

If the Brownsville Herald could only come up with four or five students from the Rio Grande Valley in its story, then we can see that five out of 39 graduating make up only about 12 percent of the graduating class. And of those, the newspaper reported that three were going to do their residency out of state and in Corpus Christi.

Federal cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke) have determined that preferential treatment for minorities in U.S. medical schools are not constitutional, but the sell of the med school in the Rio Grande Valley to produce local doctors to address the medically under-served population is a nice fantasy, and an easy way for politicians and academic bureaucrats to make political points for themselves.