A national accrediting agency has approved UC Riverside’s long-embattled plan to open a full medical school and to start enrolling future doctors next summer, officials announced Tuesday. It would be the sixth medical school in the University of California system and the first to open since the late 1960s. Last year, the same panel rejected the proposal because it looked too risky after the state refused to fund the school. But UC Riverside officials have since secured enough other public and private financing for a program that they say will help ease a doctor shortage in the Inland Empire and improve public healthcare there.

…(T)he medical school will still need about $15 million a year in state general revenue funds if it is to expand and win full accreditation over the next six years. Observers say that the state may find it hard to keep denying funding and to threaten the school’s permanent future once the doors are open to students. 

Critics, however, contend that a new medical school is the kind of unnecessary expansionism that UC and the state can no longer afford while basic education programs have suffered large funding cuts and tuition has increased rapidly…  

Full article at
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-1003-uc-riverside-20121003,0,3497398.story

Update 10-8-12: 

UCR’s medical school plays catch-up in recruiting students