Disproportionate Share

I am not in favor of closing, nor am I in favor of moving the Nevada School of Medicine to Las Vegas.  My concern is two-fold.  First that Nevada has let its ego get ahead of its intellectual capacities and financial abilities.  A medical school is the elite of all education and its costs are infinitely greater than the cost of every other program at a university.  For the state to pay $509,000 to educate a doctor when only 50% of those graduates will stay in Nevada (thus costing the state $1,018,000 to educate a doctor who will practice in Nevada) while the state provides the remainder of the eight institutions of 105,000 students with intellectual starvation funding, indicates something is terribly wrong.

If you took the entire medical school budget and spread it among the eight higher education system institutions, the money from the medical school would do little or nothing to raise the level of the rest of the system’s education above mediocre at best.  The issue is not whether the medical school should exist, the issue is how this state has allowed and supported a very small group of people, in putting a disproportionate share of the state’s money into the medical school while abandoning the rest of the higher education system. 

If this state’s leaders had seen the need and had had the desire to build a first-class higher education system in Nevada, it could have been done.  Instead it  chose to support very limited interests.