After ten minutes or so inside the Clinical Academic Building in New Brunswick, you lose awareness of its mid-1990s institutional vibe. lengthy hallways. light that is fluorescent. With their laptops tucked under their arms, students in short white coats move in small groups, giving off the half-wired, half-tired look that results from taking in too much information too quickly. Given what’s really going on inside, it’s difficult to ignore how unremarkable the scene is. Because Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School has been quietly operating one of the more ambitious experiments in American medical education, despite its modest New Jersey exterior.
The school’s origins can be traced back to 1966, when a 118-bed hospital in Green Brook Township opened to accommodate a two-year Master of Medical Science program. In order to complete their clinical training, students were required to leave the state. You can still learn something about the place’s progress from that particular detail. The program received full four-year MD accreditation by 1972. In 1986, it adopted the current name in honor of Robert Wood Johnson II, the former chairman of Johnson & Johnson, whose name has come to represent New Jersey healthcare.
However, the school’s history isn’t what makes it noteworthy today. The curriculum is the reason. The “5 Cs”—curiosity, critical thinking, clinical skills, competence, and compassion—were introduced by the school in 2021. On paper, it sounds like the kind of thing that is currently marketed by every medical school. In actuality, it is part of a competency-based MD program centered on 33 Core Clinical Conditions. Unlike the previous siloed lecture model, it integrates clinical medicine and basic science through multidisciplinary blocks. Speaking with people in the medical education community gives me the impression that this kind of reorganization is where training will go for the next ten years. Rutgers arrived ahead of most.
The numbers themselves convey a more subdued narrative. There were about 120 PhD students and 757 medical students enrolled at any given time. More than 2,450 faculty across the part-time, full-time, and volunteer ranks. 49 programs for graduate medical education. 16% of students were Ivy League undergraduates, and 42% of students are Rutgers alumni. The 2017 class was 53% native New Jersey residents and 54% female, a balance that most schools still find difficult to achieve. Additionally, the school’s minority student enrollment is among the top 10% in the country—a fact that is often overlooked in admissions brochures but probably shouldn’t be.
The school’s federally qualified health center in New Brunswick, the Eric B. Chandler Health Center, is one location where you can sense the weight of that diversity push. It is the only family health center of its kind in New Jersey, supported by a medical school and run in collaboration with a community board, and records over 60,000 patient encounters annually. It’s the kind of arrangement that, until you walk through the waiting room on a weekday morning, seems bureaucratic. Then all that appears to be doing the work is a clinic.
There have been some difficulties with the school’s reorganization within Rutgers Health. By most accounts, the 2013 merger that separated it from the former University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and combined it with Rutgers was both messy and long overdue. The renamed Rutgers Health unit appears to have settled into itself ten years later, though some faculty members continue to discuss the change in tones appropriate for unresolved issues. Distinction programs in bioethics, global health, medical innovation, and community service give the institution a sense of breadth that is more difficult to find at institutions pursuing a single brand identity.
The next ten years will determine whether the 5 Cs experiment results in physicians who are measurably different. It appears that investors in medical education—yes, that is a legitimate category now—think competency-based models will eventually take over. It appears that Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson has been getting ready for that change for a longer period of time than most of its peers have acknowledged.
