Xavier University of Louisiana has built its reputation on sending Black students to medical school. Starting next summer, it will train them itself.

The Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine has received preliminary accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits programs that grant the Doctor of Medicine degree. The decision clears the college to recruit its first class, which starts in summer 2027. Applications will open through the American Medical College Application Service in the coming weeks.

The college is a partnership between Xavier and Ochsner Health, the New Orleans health system, and it will be located in the city’s BioDistrict. It bills itself as the only HBCU college of medicine in the Gulf South.

“We are not simply opening the doors of a new medical school; we are expanding who will have the opportunity to become a physician,” Xavier President Reynold Verret said.

Xavier’s audited financial statements, federal tax filings, and federal enrollment and degree data tell the story behind that milestone: how the college came together, how it is structured, the pipeline Xavier brings, and the university’s footing as the first class approaches.

How It Got Here

The accreditation process takes about two and a half years. Xavier’s Board of Trustees approved forming a college of medicine on Feb. 24, 2024. A week later, the university signed a master affiliation agreement with the Ochsner Clinic Foundation that sets out the terms of the partnership and the financial support for building and running the college.

Leonardo Seoane, the college’s president and founding dean, will lead it into that first class. He is building an institution that stands on its own.

Its Own Institution

The medical college does not sit inside Xavier’s books. Xavier’s tax filing lists the Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine as a separate, related tax-exempt organization, and Xavier’s audit does not include the college’s finances.

Under the affiliation agreement, the college has its own board of directors that provides general oversight. The college’s bylaws reserve certain powers to Xavier’s Board of Trustees and Xavier’s president.

During the 2024-25 school year, the medical college reimbursed Xavier $260,937 for costs. Xavier’s filing reports no gifts, grants, capital contributions, loans or loan guarantees from Xavier to the college.

Xavier’s filing separately lists a $140,000 grant to the Ochsner Clinic Foundation.

The college’s tax filing for the same year reports $2.94 million in revenue, all contributions, against $2.11 million in expenses. It finished the year with $5.09 million in assets and $4.27 million in liabilities.

The affiliation agreement covers financial support for the college, but neither Xavier’s audit nor its tax filing says how much support is committed or who provides it. The accreditation announcement says neither.

What Xavier brings to the partnership is clearer, and it shows up in the university’s graduates.

The Pipeline Xavier Brings

Xavier describes itself as a leading institution for sending African American students to medical school, and its degree data show how heavily the university leans toward the sciences and health.

Xavier awarded 497 bachelor’s degrees in 2024-25. One in three, 166 in all, went to biology and biomedical sciences majors. Another 85 went into health professions majors, and 39 into physical sciences majors.

Black students earned 426 of those bachelor’s degrees, or 86 percent. Women earned 383, or 77 percent.

Xavier already trains health professionals beyond the bachelor’s level. It awarded 102 professional practice doctorates in 2024-25, all in the health professions, along with 67 master’s degrees in the health professions. Xavier runs a College of Pharmacy, and it already works with Ochsner through the Ochsner-Xavier Institute for Health Equity and Research. The college also points to Xavier’s physician assistant and genetic counseling programs as part of that history.

Xavier spent $13.9 million on research in 2024-25. That year’s federal awards included $4.7 million from the National Institutes of Health’s minority health and health disparities research program and $2.7 million under a Department of Health and Human Services Centers of Excellence grant.

The college’s case rests on need. It cites a federal projection that the country could be short more than 141,000 physicians by 2038, and notes that 60 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes are federally designated as health professional shortage areas. It also points out that HBCU medical schools train nearly 70 percent of the nation’s Black physicians.

Xavier’s answer to that need starts with its undergraduates.

The University Behind It

Xavier enrolled 3,218 students in fall 2024: 2,688 undergraduates and 530 graduate students. Women made up 76 percent of the student body.

The university received 10,260 applications for that fall and admitted 7,083, about 69 percent. Of those admitted, 839 enrolled, about 12 percent. Seventy-two percent of full-time freshmen who started in fall 2023 returned for a second year.

Published undergraduate tuition and fees for 2025-26 are $28,979. Pharmacy students pay $43,609. But few students pay the full price. Every first-time, full-time student in 2023-24 received a grant from the university, averaging $16,722, and 64 percent received a Pell Grant. The average net price for aided first-year students was $17,162.

Keeping that price within reach is one of Xavier’s largest budget commitments.

The Money

Xavier’s 2024-25 audit shows the university investing in its students and campus while drawing on its endowment to do so.

Xavier billed $90.4 million in tuition and fees and returned $49 million as scholarships and aid, a 54 percent discount. The university funded most of that aid, $36.2 million. Net tuition accounted for 29 percent of operating revenue.

Xavier’s tax filings show spending above revenue in each of the last two years, by $7 million in 2023-24 and $12.5 million in 2024-25.

The endowment helped close the operating gap. Xavier drew $13.8 million from it for operations, and $12.1 million of that came from funds the board had set aside to function as endowment rather than from donor-restricted gifts. Investment returns of $17.8 million more than replaced the draw, and the endowment grew from $182.5 million to $191.7 million.

That growth answers a question raised in Howard Tops $1.1 Billion, Four More Schools Join the $100 Million Endowment Club, which flagged an apparent drop in Xavier’s endowment as a likely difference in definitions. The audit confirms it. The $162.4 million figure in the 2024-25 endowment data counts only the market value of endowment investments, while the full endowment rose by about $9 million.

At year-end, Xavier had $70.8 million in financial assets available for general spending within a year, nearly six months of operating costs. It had drawn $2,495,000 of its $2.5 million bank line of credit.

The auditors issued a clean opinion and reported no internal control weaknesses and no findings on federal programs. The auditors resolved a prior-year finding on reporting student enrollment changes. Xavier’s financial responsibility composite score, the U.S. Department of Education’s measure of a private college’s financial strength, was 2.12. A score of 1.5 or higher passes.

That footing supports a significant investment in the campus the medical students will share.

A Campus Growing Alongside It

Xavier’s first medical class will arrive on a campus that is adding housing and facilities.

In 2020, Xavier borrowed $100 million through the federal HBCU Capital Financing Program and drew the full amount by June 2025. On June 23, 2025, it signed a second loan under the same program for $96 million over 25 years, with $1.7 million drawn by year-end. The loans fund a new residence hall, a parking structure, a campus police station and a mechanical substation. Monthly payments stood at $645,708 and will rise as Xavier draws more.

Ten days before the second loan, Xavier signed an $80.8 million contract to build an 852-bed residence hall. Completion is projected for July 2027, the same summer the medical college’s first class arrives. Xavier spent $52.6 million on buildings and equipment during the year.

The $38 Million Gift

Xavier’s resources have also grown since those books closed. On Nov. 17, 2025, the university received an unrestricted gift of about $38 million from MacKenzie Scott. That is roughly three and a half times the 2024-25 operating gap.

Because the gift arrived after June 30, 2025, it does not appear in the audited figures above. The 2025-26 school year audit will be the first to show it.

With accreditation in hand and a major gift added since the books closed, attention now turns to what the college will mean for New Orleans and Louisiana.

What Comes Next

The college projects that by 2040 its operations will generate $152.5 million in economic impact across Louisiana, including $122 million in New Orleans, and support more than 1,185 jobs statewide. It projects that the physicians it trains will add $2.9 billion to the national economy over the same period.

Several details are still to come as the college moves toward opening day:

• How many students the first class will include and what they will pay
• How much financial support Xavier and Ochsner have committed under the affiliation agreement
• Who provided the $2.94 million in contributions the college reported in its first year
• What the college’s facilities in the BioDistrict will cost and how they will be financed
• How Xavier has used the $38 million gift, and whether 2025-26 closed with a smaller operating gap

Many of those answers will become clear next summer, when Xavier’s first medical students begin training in New Orleans.