My grand dog came to visit this weekend, and I got to enjoy all three dogs sprawled on the couch, occasionally permitting room for their human companions. At one point I was sitting on the floor. But it made me smile and reminded me why I chose this profession and why people continue to choose this profession. Veterinarians get to do great work. But there are challenges.
I spent last week in Florida at an annual conference of veterinary school deans, a number that is growing with the addition of many new schools. There is still a deep need for veterinarians in most all areas of employment—government, private practice, urban and rural, research, academia, food safety—and the need includes all animal species. One response to the workforce shortage has been to open new schools, both public and private.
Since I became dean in 2020, seven new schools have received approval to admit students, and there are six more in the pipeline in the United States alone. When I started, there were only 30 schools. Interesting math. But opening a new school is neither easy nor cheap. Accreditation processes are expensive, slow, in the best of times, and also slow to adapt, yet critical for quality. Schools are trying new things including distant education, multiple cohorts of students, and compacting the traditional four years of education into three years (including summers), with fewer breaks. And most new schools will not build a teaching hospital for the fourth year, so the clinical year is distributed to many more locales, a more complicated system to assess for accreditation teams.
The new generation of students is more adapted to distance learning and non-traditional curriculum, in some ways, but pass rates on the North American Veterinary Licensing Exam, needed to become licensed to practice veterinary medicine in the U.S., are falling at some institutions (or failing to recover after the pandemic). And the reasons are complicated and many. The value of research as a component of our education is being questioned by some institutions (not by WSU, thankfully).
It is unclear how all of these issues will be settled. It will take our profession and its leadership many years (many task forces and, unfortunately, a few lawsuits) to sift through the many pressures, nuances, and changes that will be needed for us to continue to provide great veterinarians to provide quality care for the many animals that grace our lives- our farms, our zoos, our aquariums, our laboratories, our wild lands, and, yes, our couches. Thankfully, we have many gifted, deeply caring veterinarians and leaders who are ready to grapple with these questions.
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Be safe, healthy, happy, and stay hopeful. As I said on my first day on the job, the future is bright.
Take care and Go Cougs!