Drexel’s Orbit Expands

Last summer, Drexel announced a planned merger with Salus University that will widen the University’s footprint in health care education. The union will enable Drexel to add degree programs in optometry, audiology, blindness and low-vision studies, speech-language pathology, occupational therapy, and orthotics and prosthetics, and also expand physician assistant studies. Like Drexel, Salus has long been an educational pioneer. Its forerunner — the Pennsylvania State College of Optometry — opened in 1919 as the first institution in the United States to offer a graduate degree in vision rehabilitation and was among the first to use cadaver-based anatomy in training physician assistants.

Salus University
1,187

Students enrolled at Salus Universty in 2023-24

26

Students graduated in the first class, in 1922

11.5

Acres on the university’s main campus in Elkins Park

362

Employees

23

Percent of practicing doctors of audiology in the U.S. who are Salus alumni