Xavier to Open Nation’s 5th HBCU Medical School

Xavier University of Louisiana and Ochsner Health Network have worked for a decade to create a new HBCU medical school in New Orleans.

Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine

For decades, Xavier University of Louisiana has served as a key pipeline for Black students who want to study medicine. But as good as Xavier is at that—regularly sending more Black students to medical school than most colleges—their students couldn’t stay at the New Orleans campus to become doctors because the university didn’t have its own medical school.

Now, after nearly a decade of work, the HBCU has been approved to open the Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine in 2027. With the green light from the medical school accreditor, Xavier is now recruiting aspiring doctors from its own campus and from across the country to fill 50 spots in its inaugural class.

Medical educators across the country are trying to compensate for a looming shortage of doctors. In the last 25 years, 60 new medical schools opened, and many more have announced plans to do so. Often, leaders say they are hoping to serve an underserved region or population. In that regard, Xavier won’t be much different.

When it opens, Xavier Ochsner will be one of five HBCU medical schools in the United States. It will join Howard University College of Medicine (1868), Meharry Medical College (1876), Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (1966), and Morehouse School of Medicine (1975). Morgan State University, a public HBCU in Baltimore, also plans to open a medical school in the coming years.

Although African Americans make up more than 14 percent of the U.S. population, only about 6 percent of doctors are Black, data shows. Officials are hoping Xavier’s medical school can help close that gap.

“Representation is important. It’s important to have physicians in the room who are involved in making decisions, setting the priorities and deciding what health care should be,” Xavier President C. Reynold Verret said. “What we’re doing in the medical school is addressing a national need.”

Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only Catholic HBCU, enrolls about 2,600 undergraduate students. The university already offers a premedical path for undergraduates and graduate degrees in several health disciplines. After that inaugural class of 50 students, officials hope to enroll about 100 students a year in the new medical school.

Leaders envision the new HBCU medical school will expand opportunities for Black aspiring doctors and improve care for patients, but they said it could also help right a historic wrong.

In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned Abraham Flexner to evaluate the state of medical education in the U.S. and Canada. In the evaluation, known as the Flexner report, he wrote that the quality of Black medical education—and the health of Black Americans—mattered to white people even though Black doctors should only treat Black patients. He said white people could be infected if illness ran rampant in Black communities, and “the Negro must be educated not only for his sake, but for ours.” Flexner recommended the closure of five of the seven Black medical schools in the U.S., citing poor quality. Only the medical schools at Howard and Meharry survived.

“That’s an important piece of history,” Verret said. “In many ways, the establishment of the Xavier School of Medicine, it’s in our mission to contribute to that repair.”

Now, 116 years after the Flexner report, Brandi K. Freeman, president of the National Medical Association, says it’s important that Black physicians have opportunities to connect with each other, share their experiences in academic or professional settings, and connect over “why many of us entered medicine.”

Since Freeman was a student, she’s been a member of the National Medical Association, a group originally created for Black physicians in 1895, when they were excluded from other trade groups.

Although all medical schools now enroll Black students, the Trump administration’s campaign to end any race-based program or policy and other policy changes have put a strain on those students, she said.

“HBCUs, because their mission has been rooted not only in who is able to be part of medicine but the communities that they serve, are becoming even more critical at this time,” Freeman said. “HBCU medical schools and the National Medical Association, we have a shared history rooted in overcoming exclusion and really advancing the excellence of our communities and advocating for our communities.”

The benefits of Xavier’s medical school will extend throughout the city of New Orleans and across the South, Freeman said.

“The identity of your doctor can impact your care. You can have better care when you have a doctor who understands your community and your background,” Freeman said. “As we think about the need to improve the health of our community and preserve the health of our community, I’m really excited about the opportunity for Xavier opening its doors, having its first class and being able to increase the number of doctors who understand the challenges our community faces.”

Since the idea for the Xavier medical school originated, Verret said, the university worked with Ochsner Medical Center to expand other partnerships in other academic fields with low rates of Black professional participation, including genetic counseling, pharmacy and speech pathology. Xavier also collaborated with Ochsner to create a new physician’s assistant program in 2020.

Leonardo Seoane, the founding dean of Xavier’s medical school, is a pulmonary critical care physician and the chief academic officer at Ochsner Health System. Seoane said Ochsner will be a key resource for students. He described it as a comprehensive medical hub that can do complicated procedures, such as heart and lung transplants and “cutting-edge” therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

“It’s important for our students to get exposed to that,” Seoane said. “We will obviously encourage primary care, but we need representation across every specialty in medicine.”

Seoane said the new medical school will help reduce the projected national physician shortage. Federal estimates show that the United States could be short 141,000 doctors by 2038, and Louisiana alone could be short 2,000 doctors in the same time period.

But Xavier can’t meet the needs of aspiring Black doctors and Black Americans alone. Verret said educational equity in the K–12 education system is essential for preparing their future students.

“Our success also depends on offering educational equity to all students, because we have real talent, real brains in second and third grade that we are not cultivating, whether as scientists, as physicians, as lawyers, as artists,” Verret said. “Really, our progress as a nation, our strength as a nation will be in cultivating those brains, because the other countries that we compete with are cultivating their children.”