Anemia In Academia: Part 1 - Money (#533)

Force #1: Financial disparity with private practice

There is an easy explanation for the thinning corridors of academia.

Money.

It is the first thing everyone says, often with a shrug, as if the matter were settled.

Of course, they leave.

They can earn twice as much in private practice.

And it’s true.

A boarded neurologist, surgeon, or internist can step out of a university clinic on Friday and, by Monday morning, double - sometimes triple - their salary in specialty practice.

Fewer committees.

Fewer meetings.

No grant deadlines.

No annual reviews written in triplicate.

Just veterinary medicine.

If this were only an economic decision, the solution would be simple: raise salaries.

But we haven’t solved it.

Which tells me something important:

Money is real.

Money matters.

But money alone is not the disease.

It’s the first symptom.

When I first entered academia, none of us expected to become wealthy.

That wasn’t the bargain.

We accepted smaller paychecks because we were paid in other currencies.

Time with students.

Intellectual freedom.

Collegiality.

The pleasure of teaching a young clinician how to listen to a murmur or trust their hands during a neurological exam.

The quiet satisfaction of solving a case no one else could solve.

Those things were once enough.

In many ways, they were more than enough.

We stayed because the work felt meaningful.

Today, when young faculty leave after three or four years, administrators often reduce the story to spreadsheets.

They left for compensation.

But when I speak with them, the conversations are rarely about numbers alone.

Yes, they mention student loans.

Yes, they mention housing costs.

Yes, they mention what their classmates in private practice are earning.

But then their voices shift.

They talk about exhaustion.

They talk about feeling pulled in five directions at once.

They talk about spending evenings answering email instead of reading or thinking or simply being home.

They talk about loving teaching, but never having enough time to do it well.

And that’s when I realize:

Money is often the excuse that makes leaving socially acceptable.

It’s easier to say, “I couldn’t afford to stay,” than to say, “I couldn’t live the way this job made me live.”

Still, the financial gap is not trivial, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Academic medicine asks for extraordinary training:

Four years of veterinary school.

Internship.

Residency.

Board certification.

Often a PhD.

A decade, sometimes more, of deferred earnings.

Then we offer a salary that barely competes with general practice.

There is something quietly unfair about that math.

We select for the brightest and most driven people in the profession, and then we ask them to accept chronic financial strain as the price of service.

Idealism is a fragile fuel.

It burns brightly when you are young.

It burns out when the mortgage is due.

But here’s the part we don’t say out loud:

If this were only about salary, modest raises would have fixed it years ago.

They haven’t.

Across the country, schools have nudged compensation upward, added small bonuses, offered retention packages.

Yet the halls still feel thinner.

Recruitments still fail.

Clinics still rely on locums.

Which means something deeper is happening.

Money may open the door.

But something else is pushing people through it.

To me, money is the most visible force - the one we can quantify.

It shows up on spreadsheets and budget reports.

It’s easy to discuss in meetings.

It feels objective.

But it also distracts us from the quieter forces that follow:

Bureaucracy.

Burnout.

Loss of autonomy.

Metrics over mentorship.

The slow erosion of purpose.

Those are harder to measure.

And much harder to fix.

I still believe academia can be one of the most meaningful places to practice veterinary medicine.

I’ve seen what it looks like when it works - when a student finally understands a concept, when a resident masters a difficult surgery, when a team solves a case together at two in the morning.

No private salary can quite replace that feeling.

But meaning alone cannot compete forever with mounting debt and stagnant pay.

If we want the next generation to stay, we must at least make the financial sacrifice reasonable, not heroic.

Service should not require martyrdom.

So yes.

Money matters.

It is the first force.

But it is not the only one.

And if we stop the conversation there, we will misdiagnose the patient.

Because anemia is rarely caused by a single bleed.

It is usually the result of many small losses, over time.

In Part 2 of this series, I look at one of those quieter losses.

The slow, exhausting drain of bureaucracy, and how paperwork, meetings, and administrative drag may be costing us as much vitality as any paycheck ever could.

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