When Abiódún Gòkè-Paríolá became North Central College’s chief academic officer in 2015, he had a vision for the Naperville university: expand North Central’s program offerings while preserving its core spirit as a liberal arts college.

Health sciences, he said, seemed like a natural fit. Between the need for more providers in fields like nursing and the chance to work with Naperville’s Edward Hospital, the opportunities were abundant.

Nearly a decade later, North Central College has added nine graduate advanced clinical practice and two post-graduate programs to its offerings, including programs in occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assistant studies and nursing. It has also added a few undergraduate programs, including a major in nutrition science.

In that timeframe, the university also built the Dr. Myron Wentz Center for Health Sciences and Engineering, a $20 million, 40,000-square-foot facility that includes student classrooms and training spaces across medical disciplines.

This fall, it will add a Master’s Entry to Nursing Practice program, allowing students to earn a master’s degree in nursing regardless of their undergraduate degree.

It is unusual for a university to add so many programs in such a short amount of time, school officials acknowledged. But North Central is doing more than just expanding its offerings. It’s testing whether a school built on the values of a small, liberal arts college can increase its scale without losing its distinctive identity.

“It’s the same college (but) a different version of itself, which of course makes sense because if you stay stagnant, you’re going to die,” said Gòkè-Paríolá, now university president.

North Central College started its new initiative with the Master of Occupational Therapy program in 2018.

“You have to strike while the iron is hot,” said Mary Groll, dean of NCC’s School of Education and Health Sciences. “It was the right time with the right partnership, with the right amount of support, with the right people to be able to expand very quickly.”

Part of that support came from a partnership with Edward Hospital.

“It was their thoughts and their ideas, and we were trying to figure out, ‘How do we offer support as a partner here in our community?’ and I think it just grew from there,” said Robert Payton, Edward’s chief medical officer.

Payton began working with North Central on the physician assistant program after assuming his current job in 2019. Instead of driving up to an hour away for a clinical placement, he wanted the school’s physician assistant students to complete their rotations at Edward.

“We’ve had nursing programs come here to rotate their students through but really not in this realm,” Payton said. “There may have been some one-off students that may have come into the hospital, but we really hadn’t affiliated with a program like we did with North Central College.”

Now, more than 80% of clinical placements for the physician assistant program are at either Edward or Elmhurst Hospital, Groll said, calling that level of placement “unheard of” even for a medical school. She added that students typically stay in the area after finishing their training.

Those placements are increasingly valuable as demand in certain healthcare fields outpaces the supply of available medical personnel.

The physician assistant field is one of the fastest growing in healthcare, with the profession more than doubling in size since 2013, according to a report by the National Commission on Certification of PAs.

That rapid increase is needed in part to support an advanced aging population, said Elana Min, associate program director for the physician assistant program at Northwestern University.

“So PAs are rapidly entering the workforce to increase that care, but the actual training of PAs and the production of newer PAs is not keeping up with demand,” Min said.

Nursing is facing similar pressures. Jeff Doucette, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Press Ganey, a healthcare performance improvement company based in Indiana, said nursing also faces a pipeline problem, driven partially by a lack of faculty to train nurses and available clinical placement.

But high demand for fields like nursing can also lead to the creation of lower-quality programs because some schools view them as moneymakers, he said.

“We weren’t building the programs because we needed the money to balance our budget, which is what many schools do because they think of them as cash cows,” Gòkè-Paríolá said. “For us, it was a long vision that you can do well by doing the right thing that fits.”

And that vision harkens back to North Central’s core identity: a school with the liberal arts front and center.

“You can go to very good schools and get out and be a PA,” Gòkè-Paríolá said. “There has to be a reason why you come to North Central College, because we are going to add things, just as we do at the undergraduate level.”

Groll pointed to a narrative-based medicine course that teaches students to listen to a patient effectively and understand how one’s environment and relationships can shape illness and well-being. It’s a tangible way the school weaves humanities into the health sciences, she said.

But adding all these programs was not without its risks.

Gòkè-Paríolá said NCC has invested millions of dollars to get these programs up and running, noting that the first couple of years often see negative cash flow due to uncertainty surrounding enrollment numbers and attrition rates.

The university could have cut costs by housing their graduate science programs in warehouses off campus, but Gòkè-Paríolá said he believes a true liberal arts college keeps its students altogether.

The risks have been worth it so far, he said. Though the nursing program had more difficulty attracting students, all of the others have exceeded his expectations, with programs like occupational therapy attracting more students than he anticipated.

But more importantly, Gòkè-Paríolá said the university is successfully building programs that still embrace its liberal arts spirit.

“We are opportunistic … but I always ensure it aligns with who we are and where we should be going. And I think it makes a difference,” he said.

cstein@chicagotribune.com