Temple University is opening a medical school branch in Atlantic City with AtlantiCare
The four-year campus, backed by $50 million from AtlantiCare, is expected to open in August 2029. Anticipated enrollment is 40 students a year.
Temple University and AtlantiCare have agreed to open a four-year medical school campus in Atlantic City, with the first class of 40 students expected to enroll in 2029, the two nonprofit organizations announced Thursday.
AtlantiCare, which has two hospital campuses, is investing $50 million in the campus as part of an effort to increase the organization’s clinical, research, and education capabilities, CEO Michael Charlton said. “It also gives us the opportunity for recruitment, retention, and building out our own pipeline of physicians,” he said.
Atlantic City will be the third branch campus for Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine. It will be the third in South Jersey. Rowan University has two medical schools, closer to Philadelphia. It runs them in partnerships with Cooper University Health Care and Virtua Health.
Last year, Temple announced that it was opening a branch in York, Pa., in partnership with WellSpan, which has more than 250 patient care facilities and nine hospitals in Central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland.
In addition, Temple has operated a four-year campus at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Bethlehem since 2020. Its main campus is in North Philadelphia. The school’s total enrollment in Philadelphia and Bethlehem is 880. It could increase by 320 when the two new campuses are fully operational.
Medical education “allows us to develop a pipeline of medical student to resident, resident to faculty in each of our four campuses,” said Amy Goldberg, Temple’s medical school dean.
“We already see that here in North Philadelphia, where 35 of our medical students that just matched this past March elected to stay in Temple Health, and a large percentage of the medical students from the St. Luke’s campus stay there as well,” she said.
When Temple’s medical school opens a branch campus, it does not add faculty. The first 18 months or so of classes are taught over Zoom, Goldberg said. “What we say is ‘one school, four campuses,’ and you’re providing the same education to those students during the preclinical years,” she said.
Temple University president John Fry noted that there’s an economic development, “ed and meds,” angle to helping AtlantiCare become an academic medical center.
“To the extent that we can play a role in helping spur that in Atlantic City, we’d be very excited to do that,” Fry said. “We bring a lot of expertise on the medical side, yes, but also on the university side.”
