Who Will Teach Them? The hidden crisis behind vet school expansion (#553)

Every time a new veterinary school announces expansion, the headline sounds reassuring.

More seats.

More graduates.

More veterinarians.

Problem solved.

Except it isn’t.

Because the real bottleneck isn’t simply the number of students.

It’s the people who teach them.

And even more specifically, it’s the specialists.

A recent viewpoint in Veterinary Ophthalmology makes this point clearly:

The veterinary specialist faculty shortage is not all about the numbers.

That phrase caused me to pause.

Because for years we’ve talked about workforce shortages as if they were arithmetic problems.

Add schools.

Add students.

Add clinicians.

Balance the equation.

But education doesn’t work like that.

You cannot multiply students without multiplying mentors.

And mentors, especially boarded specialists willing to teach in academia, are in short supply.

The uncomfortable math

Between 2013 and 2023, first-year veterinary enrollments increased roughly 3% per year.

At the same time, faculty vacancies climbed sharply.

In 2023, U.S. veterinary colleges reported 474 funded but unfilled faculty positions, representing about 10% of the total faculty workforce.

That is not a rounding error.

That’s one out of every ten chairs empty.

Now layer on top:

• More than ten new veterinary schools launching,

• Each school needing ~50 faculty,

• A projected shortage approaching 1,000 faculty by 2030.

We are building classrooms faster than we can staff them.

It reminds me of building hospital wards without nurses.

Technically impressive.

Practically unworkable.

Why specialists matter more than we admit

Generalists are the backbone of veterinary medicine.

But specialists are the spine of teaching hospitals.

Specialists train residents.

Specialists supervise complex cases.

Specialists lead research.

Specialists anchor referral services that generate revenue for schools.

And, most importantly, specialists model excellence for students.

Without specialists, teaching hospitals slowly turn into very expensive first-opinion clinics.

The apprenticeship disappears.

When I think back to my own training, I don’t remember lecture slides.

I remember standing beside a surgeon.

Watching a neurologist localize a lesion with nothing but a reflex hammer.

Learning how they thought.

That kind of teaching cannot be scaled with Zoom links.

It requires people.

The part we talk about even less: Representation

But here’s where this essay moves beyond simple workforce math.

And I think this is the more profound point.

The shortage isn’t just about quantity.

It’s also about who is teaching.

Pet owners are changing.

Younger.

More diverse.

More culturally varied in expectations around care, communication, disability access, gender identity, religion, end-of-life decisions.

Yet veterinary faculty, especially specialists, do not reflect that diversity.

Some of the numbers are sobering:

~21% of tenure-track faculty,

~14% of non-tenure clinical faculty, and

~16% of residents,

are from underrepresented groups.

While,

Nearly half of Gen Z pet owners are non-White.

The mismatch is obvious.

If the profession doesn’t reflect the communities it serves, trust erodes. Access suffers. Care becomes culturally tone-deaf.

We start teaching yesterday’s medicine to tomorrow’s clients.

This isn’t abstract.

It shows up in the exam room

I’ve witnessed this shift.

Clients today ask different questions.

Clients expect shared decision-making.

Clients come with financial realities we didn’t talk about in the 1980s.

Clients have different family structures, languages, beliefs, and definitions of what quality of life means.

High-quality care is no longer just technical competence.

It’s cultural competence.

And that must be taught.

Which means it must be modeled.

Which means faculty matter enormously.

The pipeline problem

Another insight from the paper is the idea of the pipeline.

Specialists don’t appear overnight.

They are:

Student → DVM → Intern → Resident → Specialist → Faculty.

That’s a 15–20 year journey.

If we wait until residency to think about diversity or recruitment, we’re already too late.

It starts in primary school.

It continues through admissions, mentorship, supportive training environments, and academic cultures that make people want to stay.

This is long-term work.

Not a quick fix.

Not a press release.

My worry

Here’s what worries me.

We’re very good at announcing expansions.

We’re less good at asking the harder question:

Who is going to teach all these students?

Not just bodies.

But teachers.

Mentors.

Specialists who are willing to choose academia over higher corporate salaries.

And specialists who reflect the increasingly diverse faces of the people walking through our clinic doors.

Because if we don’t solve that, we risk something subtle but dangerous:

Lots of graduates.

Less depth of training.

Fewer role models.

More burnout.

And ultimately, lower quality care.

Not because we lacked good intentions.

But because we treated education like a numbers game.

A quiet conclusion

After more than forty years in veterinary medicine, I’ve come to believe something simple.

Buildings don’t teach.

People teach.

If we truly want more veterinarians, and better veterinarians, then investing in specialist faculty isn’t optional.

It’s foundational.

Not just more seats.

More mentors.

Not just more graduates.

More representation.

Not just bigger schools.

Better teachers.

Because in the end, veterinary education has always been personal.

One student.

One mentor.

One patient at a time.

And no spreadsheet can replace that.

Source

The Veterinary Specialist Faculty Shortage: It Is Not All About the Numbers. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12765204/pdf/VOP-29-0.pdf

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