Redefining Academic Excellence for the 21st Century
In all its efforts, Touro University is pursing academic excellence in ways that contribute most to both the individual student’s success and the broader public good.
Redefining Academic Excellence for the 21st Century
In all its efforts, Touro University is pursing academic excellence in ways that contribute most to both the individual student’s success and the broader public good.
A woman cuts into the man’s chest and separates the tissues. She pulls away the ribs and muscles to get to the lungs. Then, after studying the lungs carefully, she puts everything back together—in seconds.
The woman is a faculty member using state of-the-art 3-D photographic imaging to teach anatomy to students at Touro University’s Osteopathic Medicine campus in Middletown, New York. Touro is one of a select few medical schools in the United States that have this technology, which offers holograms of 13,000 different features of anatomy.
Dozens of doctors, researchers, policymakers, and others have visited campus to see the system at work. It allows students to digitally identify and view body parts from any direction, study them, and then immediately put them back where they belong—all at each student’s own pace—making it much easier to learn anatomy. Students who have used this modality have performed significantly better on exams than those who have not.
It’s just one example of how, at Touro, academic excellence isn’t just a performative term but the institution’s true North Star. The university’s administrators, faculty members, and students live—and continually pursue—academic excellence every day in every way.
Touro’s guiding principle of academic excellence allows it to deliver educational programs and services that meet the rapidly changing and highly challenging demands of today’s society. Those demands require investing in state-of-the-art technology like the cyber anatomy system. They also require a new, more current, vision of academic excellence in higher education in the 21st century, one that Touro has been pursuing with impressive results.
Excellence in Programs
Touro has long been ahead of the curve in educating its nearly 20,000 students in the United States and Europe through an academically excellent blend of both liberal arts and professional programs. The results speak for themselves: As many as 95 percent of its alumni are hired or enrolled in postgraduate institutions within six months of graduating.
Moreover, Touro ensures that, beyond such immediate success, students receive the in-depth as well as broad knowledge and expertise they need to progress in their careers over the long haul, enabling many graduates to reach the top ranks of their professions in a variety of sectors. For example, Touro’s accounting graduates have scored second highest on the New York State CPA exam, and many have gone on to work in high-level positions in prominent international accounting and financial companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, and Goldman Sachs.
Touro offers 239 academic programs—from those in the classic liberal arts and sciences to highly focused pre-professional ones—with an emphasis on high-demand fields that will not only provide career opportunities for students but also power our nation forward into the future. Through its high-caliber undergraduate degree program in cybersecurity, for instance, Touro is educating the next generation of much-needed professionals in the crucial areas of national and personal security. The program is one of the few in the nation that the National Security Agency (NASA) has designated as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense for its dedication to training students through its comprehensive and cutting-edge curriculum.
Touro harnesses up-to-date technology to deliver its programs to students in the most accessible ways—whether through online, in-person, hybrid courses, or other methods like Zoom, which the university was offering years before other institutions employed it during COVID. It also seeks ways to use technology to enhance student learning. Along with its digital anatomy class for medical students, it has organized summer boot camps on dental, pharmacological, and other specialties, in which undergraduates perform hands-on simulations practicing career skills like filling a tooth or compounding a drug.
And now, as AI transforms education and increasingly impacts the careers and lives of all professionals and citizens, Touro has also become a leader in revising its curriculum to help students and graduates productively apply that burgeoning technology. Touro has appointed an associate provost for AI and is developing specialized modules and courses on AI tool and concepts, working to ensure AI literacy is integrated into its extensive medical and healthcare programs, as well as its general education courses like English composition, mathematics, history, and political science.
Excellence in Teaching
Touro faculty members are excellent teachers with deep academic expertise who can bring real-world experience into their classrooms, a fact that their students continually validate. Graduate after graduate praise their professors for their academic expertise, dedication, personal support, and ability to provide first-hand exposure to potential careers.
Michael Sharf, a managing director at Ernst and Young, cites the views of many when he says, “I had outstanding professors, many of whom were accomplished professionals in their own right and who inspired me to believe in my own ability to achieve similar success.”
Eli Cohen, who founded Osmos marketing agency and was selected by Forbes for this year’s “30 under 30” listing of young people making notable impacts, agrees: “Besides meeting professors and mentors whom I confer with to this day, my education taught me the language my clients would be speaking and enabled me to relate and understand my industry.”
And Jackie Ho, a pharmacy graduate who received a prestigious national student research award and the U.S. Excellence in Public Health Pharmacy Practice Award, and is now a clinical coordinator at a hospital, recalls: “I’m so grateful to the professors. They were excellent teachers and clinicians, but even more important, they were mentors. I felt so prepared for whatever aspect of pharmacy I wanted to pursue.”
Excellence in Research and Service
Last year, Touro acquired a biomedical research facility in the Southwest where faculty are investigating everything from investigational gene therapies to infectious disease solutions. The university has also opened a new osteopathic medical campus in Montana, a state that has never had its own medical school and where 20 percent of its counties have no doctors. Touro plans to open other new medical research facilities in other areas of need around the country.
Touro encourages research skills and aptitudes among both its graduate and undergraduate students—skills they carry with them throughout their working lives. For example, a physical therapy graduate plans to stay on top of the latest research in his field because of his evidence-based Touro education, noting, “We leave the school not just as good clinicians, but as good researchers so we can apply the best research to help our patients.”
Touro also educates students through extensive engagement in community service, putting academic excellence to work in society. The university’s mobile medical units in San Francisco and Las Vegas provide free health screens for the elderly, homeless, and others in need in underserved areas. Students, working under faculty supervision, conduct the screenings and gain invaluable field experience. In a similar fashion, CPA students have provided free tax-filing support, and during the pandemic, students in pharmacy programs administered vaccines to the public for free.
These and numerous other outreach efforts reflect Touro’s Orthodox Jewish values and its mission to serve others. They are also putting into practice a long-held truth about education: Students learn best by applying what they know.
Excellence in Mission
Since its inception in 1972, Touro has grown to in 35 locations today, and its top administrators plan to continue to pursue a targeted strategy of providing top-notch programs and services in areas where they’re most needed. For example, the newest branch of Touro’s dental school will be in New Mexico, which has had a dearth of practitioners and no such school in the past.
It’s a mission-based strategy that has two components. One is to enhance and strengthen the Jewish tradition. The other is to serve humanity by filling two kinds of gaps: first, to train students who don’t have access to the academic excellence Touro offers, and second, to provide a supply of well-trained health care and other professionals to communities that particularly need them.
In all its efforts, Touro is pursing academic excellence and, indeed, redefining it in ways that contribute most to both individual student’s success and the broader public good. Touro’s expanded offerings are “meeting student demand and societal needs,” Touro President Alan Kadish has said. “It’s fulfilling both of our missions. That’s the key.”
This content is sponsored by Touro University and produced by Inside Higher Ed's sponsored content team. The editorial staff of Inside Higher Ed had no role in its preparation.
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