The Joint Legislative Audit & Review Committee (JLARC) met today to receive a presentation from the state Auditor’s Office on its performance audit report determining the costs per student for medical education at the WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine (ESFCOM) and the University of Washington School of Medicine.
The report by the Auditor’s Office highlights the complexity of identifying costs specific to medical education and complications with comparing actual costs to projected costs between two fundamentally very different medical schools at notably opposite stages of development. WSU’s Chris Mulick, director of state relations; Jim Zimmerman, vice dean for administration, accreditation and finance for ESFCOM; and Ken Roberts, vice dean for academic and community partnerships for ESFCOM provided a public agency response to the report, which you can view below. WSU thanked the Auditor’s Office for considering projected WSU costs at a date in the future by which time the college will have developed economies of scale not possible until enrollment scales up.
The inaugural class of 60 medical students in the WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine is now in its fourth week of instruction and students have already visited their assigned clinical sites across the state. Learn more about the diversity of the inaugural class here.