Four years after James Ammons first announced his desire to establish a FAMU College of Dental Medicine, the University of Florida has now unveiled a multi-million dollar plan to expand black enrollment at its own dental school.UF is asking the Florida Board of Governors to support its six-year work plan entitled: “Enhancing the size and diversity of the dentist workforce through expansion of DMD enrollment.” The project would cost $2.8M during its first year and go up to $4.6M by its sixth year.
According to the UF work plan: “Because there is a need for an ethnically and culturally diverse dental workforce, UF proposes to expand its outreach activities to recruit underrepresented and disadvantaged dental students. One mechanism the college will investigate is partnering with Florida A&M University (FAMU) to increase the proportion of under-represented minority students entering dental school.”
The work plan suggests that UF is interested pipelining more FAMU graduates into its dental school. “Planning money will be used to support the exploration of expanded academic partnerships such as with FAMU, additional outreach and recruitment efforts to identify underrepresented minority students, and planning for physical plant renovations to accommodate the additional students,” the report states.
From 1998 to 2006 the black student population at the state’s lone public dental school, run by UF, remained below three percent. This included students in the professional, graduate, and postbaccalaureate programs.
Ammons stated that he wanted to build a dental school at FAMU during his interview for the presidency in 2007. Starting that year, UF began increasing its percentage of black dental students. The UF dental school’s black student population went from 2.9 percent in 2006 to 5.5 percent in 2010.
UF’s number of black dental students is still extremely low. Florida’s black population is 16 percent according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
