Expansion Without Educators: Who teaches the next generation? (#529)

Rick LeCouteur
Feb 10
5 min read

Updated: Feb 10

I am prompted to write this essay following a recent article in the Sacramento Business Journal announcing a $120 million gift to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

According to the university, $80 million of the gift will fund a new small-animal teaching hospital as part of the school’s $750 million Veterinary Medical Complex expansion.

UC Davis said its existing veterinary hospital treats about 50,000 patients annually.

The expansion is expected to allow care for up to 20,000 additional animals each year, expand clinical trials and research, and support new diagnostic and treatment capabilities.

Sounds amazing!

But where will the educators for this expansion come from?

Veterinary medicine is living through a paradox.

We’re told with great confidence that the solution to workforce shortages is simple: open new veterinary schools and expand the class size at established ones.

More seats. More graduates.

Problem solved.

Except there’s a stubborn, under-discussed constraint that doesn’t yield to ribbon cuttings or strategic plans:

Faculty don’t appear on demand.

If you expand the number of students without expanding the number of people qualified (and willing) to teach them, you haven’t solved a shortage.

You’ve redistributed it.

And you may have diluted the very thing that makes a veterinary degree worth its price:

Rigorous teaching, supervised clinical training, and mentorship.

The faculty pipeline isn’t a pipeline - it’s a narrow straw

Let’s look at how veterinary faculty are actually “made.”

Most clinicians become faculty after years of additional training: internships, residencies, board certification, and often graduate degrees.

Most research faculty require the long runway of a PhD, postdoctoral training, grant development, and publication.

Those years are not optional if you want expertise.

They’re the reason expertise exists.

So, when a new school opens, or an established one adds 20, 40, 60 seats per class, where do the instructors come from?

They usually come from the same finite pool:

Existing veterinary colleges.
Private practice (if you can lure them away).
Specialty hospitals and industry (if you can compete).
Overseas recruitment (if visas, licensing, and life logistics cooperate).

In other words, “more schools” often means more competition for the same educators, not a brand-new supply of educators.

Expansion has two faculty problems, not one

When a school expands, we tend to think only about quantity:

“We need more teachers.”

But there are two separate faculty needs:

Didactic teaching faculty

Anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, microbiology, parasitology.
These aren’t modules you can casually outsource.
These are foundational sciences.
They require teachers who understand both the material and how it maps to clinical reasoning.

Clinical faculty and clinical case access

This is the real choke point.
In clinical training, the student-to-teacher ratio matters because animal lives are involved.
“See one, do one” isn’t a teaching philosophy; it’s a lawsuit and a welfare issue.
Clinical competence is built through supervised repetition, not observation.

A school can add seats faster than it can add clinical faculty. It can also outgrow its clinical caseload, referral base, ICU space, surgery lists, teaching rounds, and mentorship bandwidth.

If you expand without increasing clinical teaching capacity, you risk creating something that looks like clinical training from a distance but feels, to students, like standing in the back of a crowd.

The quiet cost: faculty burnout and the erosion of mentorship

Even in established schools, many faculty are already stretched thin - teaching, clinical service, research productivity, grant pressure, committees, accreditation documentation, student well being responsibilities, and, increasingly, a moral burden: trying to keep training humane when resources are tight.

When expansion happens without proportional faculty growth, the first thing that tends to slip is the thing nobody can measure on a spreadsheet:

Mentorship.

The hallway conversations.

The case review after rounds.

The careful correction in surgery.

The calm voice that teaches a student not just what to do, but how to think when the animal in front of them isn’t following the textbook.

Mentorship is “inefficient.”

And it’s the whole point.

“We’ll just hire clinicians from practice.” Will you?

This is the most common reply when faculty shortages are raised:

We’ll recruit from private practice.

But recruiting experienced practitioners into faculty positions isn’t as simple as posting a job ad.

Private clinicians often ask reasonable questions:

Will my salary support my family and debt?
Am I expected to publish?
Will my schedule be stable, or will it be clinical service plus teaching plus meetings plus weekend call?
Will I have protected time to teach, or will teaching be something I squeeze in between emergencies?
Will I be valued as a teacher or judged against research metrics I never signed up for?

If the answer to these questions is fuzzy, people don’t move. Or they move briefly, burn out, and leave, taking their teaching talent with them.

The accreditation question nobody wants to dwell on

Accreditation exists to protect the public and the profession. It’s meant to ensure graduates meet standards of competence and safety.

But the system is under pressure when growth accelerates:

New schools seek approval,
Established schools expand rapidly,
Distributive clinical models proliferate, and
Student numbers rise faster than faculty numbers.

This isn’t an argument against innovation.

But it is an argument for honesty.

If we dilute supervision, shorten hands-on opportunities, or lean too heavily on already-burdened external partners, we may create graduates who are technically credentialed but less prepared.

Then, we’ll wonder why the profession reports rising stress, fear of complaints, and early-career attrition.

A hard truth: expansion can worsen shortages in the short term

Here’s the cruel irony.

If you open new schools and expand class sizes without solving faculty recruitment and retention, you may temporarily worsen the workforce problem because:

Existing schools lose faculty to the new ones,
Faculty-to-student ratios decline,
Teaching quality erodes,
New graduates require more support in practice,
Practices spend more time training, and
Clinicians burn out faster.

That is not a theoretical concern.

It’s a predictable systems effect.

When a training system expands too quickly, the burden shifts downstream.

So, what would responsible expansion look like?

If a school wants to expand, the conversation should begin with faculty, not buildings.

Responsible growth might include:

Faculty-first funding: endowments and budgets explicitly tied to teaching positions, not just construction.
Teaching-focused career tracks: prestige, promotion, and job security for exceptional educators, not just grant winners.
Protected teaching time: real, enforced boundaries around clinical load when someone is assigned students.
Competitive compensation: not just salary, but sustainable workload, call structures, and benefits.
Residency-to-faculty bridges: incentives and mentorship pathways that make academia a realistic long-term home.
Genuine partnerships for distributive clinical training: supported, compensated, quality-assured, not “free labor” relationships with busy hospitals.
Retention as strategy: exit interviews, workload audits, and leadership accountability when faculty churn becomes “normal.”

And above all: transparent reporting. If we’re going to increase class size, the school should publish faculty-to-student ratios, clinical case availability, teaching loads, and retention rates, not as marketing, but as professional accountability.

The question I keep coming back to

When an administrator announces expansion, I always want to ask:

Who teaches them?

Not who will stand at a lectern.

Not who can be listed on a website.

Who will be there at 2 a.m. for the blocked cat.

Who will guide the student’s hands the first time they place a catheter in a dehydrated dog.

Who will teach judgment, restraint, and humility - the invisible curriculum of competence.

Buildings can be commissioned.

Seats can be counted.

Announcements can be made.

But faculty are the living heart of a veterinary school.