More Students, More Patients: But who teaches them? (#522)
- Rick LeCouteur
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Every so often I hear an announcement that sounds, at first blush, entirely good.
More opportunity. More access. More care. More growth.
This week it was a short “Minute with Mark” message from the dean at UC Davis:
The promise was straightforward and upbeat:
Increase the veterinary class by hundreds of students.
Treat tens of thousands more animals.
Launch new programs.
Support new research.
It is the kind of language donors like.
It is the kind of language administrators like.
It is the language of expansion.
But as I listened, an old clinician’s question crept in. It was the same question I used to ask myself standing in a crowded teaching hospital hallway at 6:30 a.m., coffee in hand, waiting for rounds to begin.
Who, exactly, is going to teach all those students?
Because buildings don’t teach. And slogans don’t teach. And gifts , however generous, don’t teach.
People teach.
When I trained, veterinary education still felt like an apprenticeship.
You stood beside someone. A surgeon. An internist. A crusty old farm vet with hands like fence posts.
You didn’t just watch. You absorbed.
How they held a scalpel. How they spoke to a worried client. How they paused before making a decision.
Those things are not scalable.
You cannot double them by doubling enrollment.
Clinical teaching is stubbornly human.
One patient. One student. One mentor.
Again, and again.
So, when we say hundreds more students and tens of thousands more cases, there’s a quiet arithmetic problem hiding in the background.
More students require:
More boarded specialists.
More residents.
More technicians.
More nurses.
More staff.
More time.
And those people don’t spring up overnight.
A boarded neurologist or surgeon represents a decade or more of training.
Many can earn two or three times an academic salary in private or corporate practice.
Recruitment is already hard.
Retention is harder.
If the faculty numbers don’t grow in step with enrollment, something else happens:
Workloads stretch.
Clinics get busier.
Teaching time shrinks.
Mentorship thins.
Burnout creeps in.
I’ve seen it happen. Most of us in academia have.
You don’t notice it all at once. It’s subtle.
A little less time for rounds. One more case squeezed in. A resident who looks permanently tired. A colleague who quietly leaves for private practice.
Death by a thousand small efficiencies.
There’s also a philosophical question we rarely ask out loud.
Should veterinary schools be bigger?
Or, should they be better?
Growth sounds virtuous, almost moral. As if “more” automatically means “good.”
But education isn’t manufacturing.
You can’t mass-produce judgment. You can’t scale compassion. You can’t automate mentorship.
The best parts of my own training - the parts I still carry with me - happened in small, unhurried moments beside someone wiser.
Not in crowded rotations. Not in throughput metrics. Not in strategic plans.
None of this is an argument against philanthropy or ambition. We need both. Veterinary medicine needs resources, facilities, and research support.
But every time we promise expansion, we should ask the quieter, more practical question first:
Where will the teachers come from?
Because in the end, a veterinary school is not its hospital tower or its donor plaque or its enrollment statistics or its naming rights.
It is the people who stay late to help a student place their first catheter.
It is the clinician who lets a nervous fourth year student do the surgery while they watch closely.
It is the mentor who says: “Come here and feel this. Listen to this. Think about this.”
Without them, growth is just numbers.
With them, it becomes education.
And if we forget that, and if we build bigger without investing deeply in the humans who teach, we risk creating something that looks impressive from the outside but feels strangely hollow within.
More students? More patients?
Yes.
But only if we remember the simplest truth:
In a veterinary school, nothing matters more than the person standing beside the student.
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