I think it's mostly baseless for people to make claims against the curricula of newer schools. What are such claims founded on, other than silly supposition?
I know quite a number of faculty at several of the new schools. Off the record, they've told me that the curricula are disorganized and often headed by very junior faculty (some only a year out of residency.) When you have an ocular disease or pediatric course developer who is fresh out of residency and no experience in writing course material, you're most likely not going to get a coherent program for that topic. Aside from that, a couple of senior faculty I have spoken with at one particular school told me the quality of the students in their program was dramatically lower than that of the programs they taught at previously, and that this seemed to be the case in some of the other new schools.
Clinical training programs, as a rule, will have a lot of kinks and problems when they start up. Faculty who are absorbed from other, established programs, will not have the luxury of simply using their old course material, since it belongs to the previous college. It has to be written from scratch, and that task seems to be going disproportionately to junior faculty. This is not something that is inherent to private, new schools, but it does seem that new optometry programs seem to be comfortable with assigning some of the most critical tasks to faculty with little or no experience.
New programs are new programs. That doesn't change the fact that we now have 22 programs, 5 of which have sprung up in the last few years, and we're creating ODs at a rate that is probably 3x what's needed. So, as I said, all optometry grads will be facing an enormous uphill battle, which will only get steeper as these new schools start to crank out product, but those graduating from the newest programs will have a steeper hill to climb.
