One month as a graduate student at Stanford convinced me to withdraw my application to Stanford Med.
The ONE outstanding aspect of Stanford is that they really take care of housing for students....most of the grad/med/law/business students live in a couple Graduate housing units (Rains, Escondido Village,...) and it's like being a freshman all over again....except everyone is older!
But the town of Palo Alto sucks and the University itself is over-rated: the administration really doesn't give a f*ck about its students' education as long as US News tells everyone that Stanford is a great school.....
Med School barely escapes probation
April 6, 1999
By The Stanford Daily Staff
By Anitha Reddy
Contributing writer
The national agency that accredits American medical schools has
Narrowly voted not to place the School of Medicine on probation. A recent study found
the poor quality and condition of Stanford's teaching facilities unacceptable, according to
a letter the agency sent to President Casper. Accreditation by the national agency, the
Liaison Committee on Medical Education, is an eligibility requirement for institutions
seeking federal funds. Accreditation is also necessary if an institution's graduates are
to be eligible to take the United States Medical Licensing Examination, a test one must
pass to practice medicine in the U.S. The agency's letter to Casper included specific
condemnations of outdated lecture halls and teaching laboratories. The agency also had
harsh criticismfor the Medical School's library, which only has air conditioning in those
areas used by librarians, no bathrooms and a subpar computer system.
Michael Ennen, a third-year medical student, said conditions in the
library are so bad that "on any given Saturday there are just as many
Stanford medical students in the UC-San Francisco medical library as there
are in Stanford's. That many people drive up."
Administrators recognize that a problem exists at the school. At a
Recent Faculty Senate meeting, the medical school's senior associate dean for
Education and student affairs, Phyllis Gardner, deplored the "abysmal state of
our educational infrastructure ¬ library, classrooms, and information
technology." Casper has also said the medical school's teaching facilities
should be updated.
The LCME's harsh stance have been influenced by a petition signed by
99 percent of the student body calling for a greater attention to the quality
of teaching facilities. Ennen and another student, Jean Drouin, organized the petition last
fall and sent it to the LCME. In their cover letter, the students "encouraged
[the LCME] to remain steadfast in [its] requirements for Stanford's
accreditation," Ennen said.
According to Ennen, the "same [facilities] problems had been cited
in [accreditation] surveys since 1983. For 14 years the school blew them
off." Clinical Pharmacology Prof. Kenneth Melmon, head of the medical school
Faculty Senate, attempted to explain why the school did not act to improve
facilities following the LCME's earlier complaints. "I think first of all in the early
days of critique people didn't necessarily agree with the critique so they considered
it much less important than they consider it now. There were responses to it; maybe
they were whole-hearted, maybe they were half hearted, but there were responses.
There was a lot of incomplete communication on both sides," Melmon said.
While Director of Medical School Admissions Gabriel Garcia noted that
the "clinical facilities are outstanding," Medical School Dean Eugene Bauer
conceded that "other resources need to be brought to bear to upgrade our more
didactic teaching facilities." "We've been actively engaged in investigating the
various options that are available to us for dealing with these problems. The scope of
solutions that we're talking about are at a minimum of $40 million, possibly $40 to
$60 million," Bauer said.
At the recent Faculty Senate meeting in which these issues were
discussed, Melmon pointed out that Stanford, unlike other medical schools, had made
no large investment in its teaching facilities since its move to the Palo Alto campus in 1959.
A continued emphasis on building facilities for disease research rather than teaching has
created the current situation. "It is far easier to get federal funds to underwrite research
costs as opposed to teaching costs," Melmon added. "Nowhere did the LCME say anything
about the quality of the educational experience or deficiencies related to content of educational
experience," Bauer said. He stressed the opportunities for one-on-one interaction between
faculty and students working together on experiments at a premier research
institution.
"This is not a situation in which one can position research priorities versus educational priorities,"
Bauer said. Ennen, however, disagreed. "At the end of the day, that just doesn't wash. You don't go
and study in someone's research lab. As some abstract theoretical concept it's true. In day-to-day reality, research and educational space are not equivalent," he said. "Most students would say that the teachers are fantastic," Ennen continued. "But the facilities are crippling their ability to be innovative in the teaching techniques that they use. The physical space not only doesn't promote [such endeavors], it actually detracts
from them." While Ennen said that he would be the first to admit that "the decision to attend a certain
medical school is multifactorial, many prospective students had astutely honed in on the disparity between
Stanford's reputation and stature and the state of its facilities." Ennen and Garcia also differed on the effect that
an LCME decision to put the medical school on probation would have on recruitment efforts. Ennen
thought it would be "completely devastating," while Garcia thought it would have "a minor effect on those
people who were wavering between us and another school." Regardless of the hypothetical consequences of
probation, there now seems to be a galvanized consensus among both administrators and students
to overhaul teaching facilities. "This is something that clearly has to be done. This is something
that will be done. This is something that the LCME has mandated will be done," said Bauer.
