The New College Try

The animal health industry, veterinary profession and pet owners largely acknowledge the acute, yearslong shortage of veterinarians. So how do we begin to reduce the shortfall? By finding ways to produce more professionals, which is what human health care has done for decades by graduating more MDs and DOs and adding physician assistants and nurse practitioners to the mix. Yet human medicine still doesn’t have enough of them. The lesson learned: Scarcities rarely are solved, but imagine what U.S. medical care would look like if partial remedies hadn’t been deployed.

This article is about arithmetic and limitations in the veterinary profession, specifically:

• What are we doing to add a significant number of new veterinary schools?
• How did we get here?
• Can we remove the limitations that make solutions harder or too slow

We’ll start by diving into where we are and the complicated process to birth at least eight more programs.

Enter the Horse Doctor

The history of U.S. veterinary medicine and educating its practitioners is one of limitations — some self-imposed and others cultural. What do I mean by that? Veterinary schools initially were organized to address the needs of agriculture and the transportation of crops and goods by horses. The medical care of companion animals such as cats and dogs was a minor concern in the 1800s. Back then, the infrastructure requirements for doctoral large animal programs were massive, which mostly limited the sponsors to land-grant institutions supported by state legislatures willing to invest public monies.

When companion animal medicine and surgery arrived on the scene, higher education limited veterinary training to the offerings inside expensive, on-campus teaching hospitals. By “expensive,” I mean extremely pricey to build and operate.

Until recently (the past five years), organized veterinary medicine saw its mission as limited, not emboldened, by consumer demand. The profession’s leaders worried that we might have too many veterinarians. The concern about the need to limit the number of DVM graduates coincided with a 30-year stretch in which just one new veterinary school opened: Western University in Pomona, California. Over that period, the U.S. population doubled, and MD and DO programs grew by 45%. (I should note that only when litigation was threatened was Western University and its distributive clinical curriculum welcomed by the accreditation-granting AVMA Council on Education.)

Meanwhile, the COE accredited more foreign schools, three of which (Ross, St. George’s and UNAM in Mexico City) triggered intense debates in the AVMA House of Delegates and at American Veterinary Medical Association conventions. The popular fear that the industry was turning out too many veterinarians led to calls to stop accrediting new schools and reduce U.S. class sizes.

(Full disclosure: I represented Ross University in its accreditation campaign and fought to successfully overturn the COE’s initial rejection of UNAM.)

The overpopulation debate reached its crescendo and began to subside after the accreditation of two domestic nonprofit institutions: Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, and Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona. LMU implemented a version of Western’s distributive model, while Midwestern effectively built a land-grant campus that includes a teaching hospital.

The New Dynamic

What became clear but not yet appreciated nearly a decade ago was that the United States faced a shortage of veterinarians as early as 2014, the year Lincoln Memorial and Midwestern opened. To be fair, no one foresaw that Americans’ view of pets would undergo a wholesale transformation in the 1990s and early 2000s, a sea change documented in my 2020 book, “Pet Nation.” What I chronicled was this:

• Dogs and cats went from accessories to center stage in U.S. households.
• Pet spending ballooned.
• Pet acquisitions (adoptions and sales) exploded.
• Dogs showed up seemingly everywhere in society.
• Millennial pet owners burst on the scene, demanding a scale and quality of pet health care matching their personal medical care. (Today, millennials and Generation Zers own half of America’s pets.)

All that is great unless you don’t have enough veterinarians and veterinary technicians to see more pets.

Today, Dr. Jim Lloyd, an economist and the University of Florida’s former veterinary college dean, forecasts a shortage of 15,000 U.S. veterinarians and 70 million pets going without veterinary care by 2030. We face the labor challenge even with the recent openings of three DVM programs: the University of Arizona (2020), Long Island University (2020) and Texas Tech University (2022). The first two are distributive and the latter a mix.

Next in Line

Here are the new programs in front of the Council on Education as of August 2023:

• A Lincoln Memorial University satellite campus near Jacksonville, Florida. (I am consulting.)
• Clemson University, a public land-grant institution in South Carolina. The proposal includes a teaching hospital developed by Dr. Tim Boosinger, a former Auburn University veterinary college dean.
• Rowan University, a public institution with financial support from New Jersey legislators and a major donor.
• Lyon College School of Veterinary Medicine at Heifer International, a private nonprofit institution in Little Rock, Arkansas. Dr. Eleanor M. Green, who once headed the veterinary program at Texas A&M University, is the founding dean. (I am consulting.)
• Arkansas State University, a public institution in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
• Three programs, including one hosted by an historically black college or university, in different regions of the United States. I am a consultant to all three, none of which were announced publicly at the time of this writing.

The Station Master

What paths must those eight institutions navigate before welcoming an inaugural class? All accreditation trains run through the COE station.

The Council on Education publishes exhaustive procedures and rules governing the accreditation process for new schools. That long list was updated in June 2022 with the addition of a requirement that all new programs participate in a consultative site visit (preceded by a self-study) before a comprehensive self-study and COE site visit can occur. The consultative process adds eight to 12 months to an already-slow process. The rules and procedures provide that when making accreditation decisions, the COE also must consider the needs of the veterinary profession and the public at large.