of college of medicine for the regional campus here in sarasota thank you all for joining me today i really appreciate you taking this ng to do this i would like to start with a little bit of history about each of your institutions pacifically how it relates decided that the path at that time or the towns needed a wonderful college they had railing which is also wonderful but they thought some a university or college and they settled on a liberal arts college it was founded and the first students came in sixty five it was founded private it struggled nearly went under it was taken over by the state one nine hundred seventy five which saved it and it became a fully independent member of the state university system and the smallest in two thousand so that's and i'm here because it's one of the best known liberal arts colleges in the country there are normally rather expensive this is a state school and it for it also produced a couple several really fantastic mathematicians which is laon background and it was curious about the place and the nation the mission of the college  sex that's correct it's been ungraded for since its inception its students compete with themselves not with each other their students do extremely well eighty percent go to money to buy a foreclosed home tell about three miles south on the trail and that became the beginning of the ringling school of art and so on so i like to tell people john i was a true developer he got his name on t college of other people's money are our goal that is that we are one of the very top art design colleges in the country and we're not satisfied with that we are on our way to becoming the preeminent art design college period were wide and we're on a very very fast track to get there and our mission and is to educate young people as artists and designers who are also socially responsible citizens wonderful thank you and  one of the interesting things because you know he owned a lot of property here i believe he was one of the first people to use art or even education as an economic development tool because he wanted to show people  north there is more of florida and swamps and mosquitoes and so he wanted to have a cultural kind of community so that he could attract people to share a shot of them to buy his land and  was owned by a former circus employee and we've not been able to substantiate it but if it's true then all three of you can have that that direct link to john meaning to do so i'm a little i'm impressed and thankful to be here and be the only thing that's really old about our campus is the building which was in the one nine hundred thirty s late one nine hundred twenty s but the college of medicine itself was created in two thousand two thousand won so we're the youngsters on the block and what was unique is that our college of medicine does not train medical students in a big university hospital which is fairly characteristic across almost all colleges of medicine except for a few we have a distributed model so the medical school our intel has and then after that the second two years the students are distributed to one of our six regional campuses which cover most of the state and then three smaller campuses for certain specialties so we came here in two thousand and five our first class arrived first class graduated two thousand and seven and then we've been here since growing so we average maybe only forty students in the  twenty thirty or twenty fourth your students have graduated approximately one hundred eighty nine students but it's a long road medicine just takes forever and our goal of course is to get them back into the community and we've started to do that and  sarasota when they come here i mean that what's not to like as they say they're treated so well because the physicians in the community is so nice to them even though the was we said you don't get out much because a kind of sequester so not too many people see them except the patients they take care of so we don't have as much visibility as the other big organizations in the community which have a lot of students who are a lot of work but they're starting to get out they do they do they start to do that we have a bench that they go to and i go and speak at various organizations and let youth in our community sometimes when we think of institutions of higher learning and i look at them i think that they're sort of mini cities and in and of themselves not only do you have to provide the academic  institution learning and capacity but you also have to think about things like student housing security parking transportation parks events entertainment libraries a lot of the same things that a city government has to think about so i was thinking about that maybe your institutions are sort of cities within a city and how does that help or hurt our efforts to try to engage with the students i heard a lot when i was campaigning from the students themselves i would reach out often to students and they would say they felt isolated  and then you would say well that how can we engage you what can we do best to engage you so i see it sort of as this balancing act between they're on your your campuses they're part of your institution and they feel comfortable staying there but i want them to have a sense of place when they're here they're here in sarasota and they're further along when they're at the medical school so they're thinking more about settling down yes when they're in your two institutions they're thinking about maybe graduate school or getting a job how can we better reach out to the students begin with or go back looking at your analysis there are institutions there's a lot of really fine institutions in in sarasota and and brained and the there's new college which is top ranked public liberal arts college there is ringling college of art design which is just if you think of art and technical schools which is a separate contiki classification there are always in the top five the college of medicine u has a number of different programs here so it's got college of medicine it's got a conservatory program that just tops in the world we were talking about it before we came it's guide and it's also got a first class art form a community college and they're all real close and there's any one of us doesn't really have the critical mass but together we're pretty massive we were able to take care of our students but one of the things we've been trying to do that's partly getting together is to really thirds when you put us together although sarasota brain doesn't have a research one in florida when people think of universities they similar to that but it's dispersed and we think that if we have our students interacting more and so on they they will they will you're right we send them out in the world but they will come back and so we've been working on doing that and and getting them more out into the community but but together in ways that and the more students the merrier  it's one of your comment about educational institutions normally as that we tend to be someone insular because we are an eco system within ourselves and as you say it's sort of like a city with a setting but that's not true of the institutions here we're much more connected we're very very connected with the community and done a number of initiatives to be part of that and the same thinks true with new college and  r so to manage it is really connected and state college or at the same because they don't have residence halls so they have the students who are coming from this community to their places one of the things that  various companies in sarasota and it all with the idea of connecting the students here locally with the industry this year because too often in sarasota seeing solely as a retirement community  and it is amazing to see what can happen and that's so you know form someone who really wanted to make certain that they were able to connect and tell them about what is happening it was  just so many young people and it was it was really good it was really it was fake and you know mary and i went home before it started our students are somewhat further along in their education and so somewhat more independent so for us it's housing cost because it only come here from tel se they pay a fair amount for housing and they're all on substantial loans by the time come to us our students are fairly heavily in debt and so they try to get by with whatever they can but they're all driving all independent they really only show up at the campus maybe once a week the rest of the time they with their individual physicians we cover three counties six hospitals over three hundred fifty physicians on our faculty and so if you add that all up over a couple of years time and a year's time they see thousands of patients thousands of patients and these are people with whom they have a real connection because they spend time talking to those people and this is what we're really trying to teach them here in contrast to what we would ordinarily learn in a big university hospital where the student is w order here they're right up there first assisting in the surgeries with permission and they're also doing everything else first as far as the patients concerned and patients love to talk to constituents and they want to tremendous about and they bring that back and we have various conferences on some of these issues so you have from saying actually we graduated hundred eighty nine from our campus a little over a thousand from the university between tampa and down south to maybe as far as that's i think almost sixty physicians and returned after their residency program institutional authority and for a stay at memorial hospital thirteen thirteen students there are now physicians actually around here yeah yeah and so after a few years we hope to get well they'll say how could they not  it's a lot of every time you graduate from one rank to another and i'm sure this is true in every line of work your job level and all of a sudden you realize you don't know as much as you thought so it's a continual practice and that's what they want and they're doing extremely well and they're highly desired i would say that one of the things that was mentioned though is housing costs are you know particularly when the economy is booming so i love seeing all the housing go up but you know if the prices are going up too and so it's you know and then it makes it  practice so i guess my question is like what can the city do what can the community do better to ease this transition to provide for affordable housing either models are the best practices out there in other cities where they are it's probably worse here because we end up with a number of retirees who are living you know and what you have a little bit more wealth potentially as opposed to someone who might move to let's say asheville north carolina or whatever which is somewhat of a similar community in that regard so so i think that housing costs here are probably higher than they are in at a place like that and they've got major universities and national as well so i don't i don't know if there is a specific answer about the housing part but it's a it's a problem not only for students but obviously for the service workers that we have here in order to be able to afford it so you know we need to make have incentives for people to be able to build affordable housing and being able to then you know so that people come in actually for the rent an apartment or house itself so i think that's a common problem in this community and one that you know when we had a major recession it was not a big problem but now it's come back it's not just hosing and service workers and faculty it's it's inexpensive space students are very entrepreneurial they'll set things up if space isn't very expensive and like asheville has tons of whatever the it is and it is the land so valuable and we do the some of the tax base of the city is very expensive condos and things like that which are not fully occupied the whole time so if there were if there were ways  city could and i don't know you know there's only so much you can interfere with life but i kind of prefer a residence that where there are more or less all year round and increase the d chemistry and the right moment actually when i first i've been you know on the i'm the only guy show i've been here now eighteen years and you know we tried to do it earlier and it didn't work and then but this time it has really taken and it really is it is wonderful to see because it's a great thing for the students and it's also a great thing for the community in general and that's because of the fact that we know one of the first things we did was allow for cross registration us so we each have much in our own sort of separate focus of what we do so we're the art college within this multi is the arts and sciences college within this multiverse and so what happens is that we end up having these different functions but we have at wrangling even though we teach the liberal  arts we don't have a great choice so we have students who want to take foreign language so they're able to enroll at new college taking in foreign language and taken the course and then it's you know my financial vice president it's not a happy camper about it because we're the most expensive but nonetheless it's the right thing to do and then the community also benefits because now we do have this whole  critical mass of higher education and people can start thinking of this community as a higher education institution place almost like you can think of as maine university florida or tallahassee  and that when you start thinking about it in this larger context it has a major impact for economic development in terms of bringing businesses here are attracting people and so on and so forth has it at so much that what happens on the business world if you have a major educational institution with and that community and i would just from our point of view as far as our students are concerned they see this community as a great place to potentially come back and raise a family because of all those institutions that are here they're incredibly sophisticated and they're really high quality and this so many of them in addition positive there's a lot to do in this community that doesn't require a lot of money all kinds of out there activities and all kinds of events you can attend they don't require high dollar price entrance so those are really positive things i mean you have you seems that are open to museum and students that do that state was amazing i mean i've been to them on several occasions now and it's just very impressive i've been here a long time and i've seen the community grow up it does make a lot of sense we were told when we first started the company that is you can't do that in other words which is common i guess when you learn something new but it was so different than the traditional training for medical students that you can't have a community physician training a medical student clinically and have them do well but our students do outrageously and not only that but their social skills are paramount they go up a new one of us and residency programs and they shine they go off to residency programs for of elective rotations just to see what they're li and i get emails back from the directors of those programs saying we've never seen students like this because they're forced to do that on a regular basis you can't you cannot see that in fact but they are not not have that th in fact i think and usual thing just start on the various programs that are dispersed thing where there is true excellence in a variety of spots and it's more dispersed and spread through i think that's what we're going to see more of in the it's first century and so i think we're actually reading a charge here that is going to become a national model in in just a variety of ways it's a kind of new model of ask you all about where you sign your institutions and let's say twenty years if you can do you got thirty seconds we're simply going to have a lot more positions returnable also have a full physician assistant program so we're going to really bring a lot of people back to example us and so about is going to continue you know ensuring the reputation of the college but also sooner so will be the top among the top ten fold liberal arts colleges in the country public or private will be about twice the size that we are now will will and but will still always be the smallest institution in the state university system and will it will probably have a few joint graduate programs one of the very twenty first century yeah thank you very much they really appreciate you taking time out of your day to join me here hopefully we can have another discussion continue