Temple University President On The Vision For Its New Atlantic City Campus
The largest public university in Philadelphia is expanding its footprint down the shore.
Temple University is teaming up with AtlantiCare to open a new branch of the Katz School of Medicine, it announced April 30. Its first class with 40 students is scheduled to begin studies in 2029.
Temple President John Fry hopes to ultimately expand the class size to 160, he said Thursday during Bisnow’s Atlantic City State of the Market at the Showboat Resort.
“There's a major physician shortage projected in the years to come, and so we're going to expand our capacity, do our part to educate, train and hopefully retain physicians in the Atlantic City area,” Fry said in remarks to the audience on a big screen via Zoom.
An exact site for the school hasn’t been identified at this time, but it will be near AtlantiCare’s existing campus in the city.
The hospital system has a large presence on Atlantic Avenue, behind the boardwalk and many of Atlantic City’s casinos.
Fry has been eyeing a medical school in Atlantic City since his tenure at Drexel University, which ended in 2024. He credited the concept to AtlantiCare CEO Michael Charlton, who has helmed the institution since 2023.
“This is really his vision of a sort of downtown eds and meds district,” Fry said.
The hospital system will invest $50M in the project, while Temple will provide the clinical and academic infrastructure, he said.
The administrator has broader ambitions for the medical school, where he said the number of applications has reached 14,000.
“We're hoping over time, in conversations with AtlantiCare and the mayor and leadership in Atlantic City, that we might be able to add more programs depending on what the needs are,” Fry said.
“We're hoping that we can also partner with our friends at [Stockton University] to think about things we can do together.”
Fry has spent decades in higher education, including tenures at the University of Pennsylvania and Franklin & Marshall College, but he has cultivated a reputation of being particularly focused on development.
After overseeing a wave of expansion during his 14-year tenure at Drexel, Fry brought a similar mindset to Temple.
The school last year purchased Terra Hall in Center City for $18M after its former owner, the University of the Arts, shuttered suddenly amid a 2024 bankruptcy.
Temple also announced plans for a new residence hall at the northern end of Liacouras Walk in February. It will occupy the former Peabody Hall site after the dorm was demolished in 2018.
The new mixed-use project featuring retail and recreational facilities will allow Temple to renovate the nearby Johnson and Hardwick halls. It will be the first new residential building at the university since Morgan Hall opened in 2013.
