Regents approve salary increases, College of Medicine
The Board also approved raising the minimum GPA requirement for transfer applicants to UH. Students with 15 hours or more college credits will need a minimum transfer GPA of 2.25 to be looked at for admission. Automatic acceptance for transfer students will remain at a 2.5 transfer GPA.
Previously, students with more than 30 credit hours under their belts and a 2.0 GPA could be automatically accepted to UH.
Raymund Paredes, Commissioner of Higher Education in Texas, spoke at the meeting and said the University of Houston system as a whole is not on pace to help the state achieve its goal of 60 percent of Texans age 25–34 having a degree or certificate by 2030.
Texas needs to increase the amount of degrees or certificates granted by 1.3 percent each year to reach its goal, Paredes said. He said UH is well ahead of that, but other universities in the system are not.
And the plan to have it on campus is perfect! That means that any research dollars it brings in will count towards our AAU metrics.
Having a med school off-campus, and, as a consequence, not being able to count that school’s research dollars towards AAU metrics is one of the main reasons that Nebraska lost its AAU designation.
As planning dean for the forthcoming UH College of Medicine, which was approved by the school’s Board of Regents in November, Spann hopes to solve this problem by producing a different type of doctor from a different type of medical school. He says most medical schools are “more focused on sick care” than on wellness. Many of their graduates choose to become specialists, a pathway generally considered to be more prestigious and more lucrative than primary care. But Spann sees a shortage of primary care doctors nationwide, and in Texas specifically, which ranks 47th in the ratio of primary care doctors to residents.
So UH will take a different approach, by creating a medical school that doesn’t focus on elite specialties and instead develops physicians focused on primary care who have a particular interest in underserved populations in rural and urban Texas.