My concern here is that 3 year programs start becoming more favorable to produce vets quicker and get students in and out the door and essentially create a “cash grab” atmosphere.
this is probably exactly what's going to happen since we're already seeing it on the human side of things. There are many accelerated MD programs and very many accelerated BN programs at this point. On the surface, I can't really think of any significant student benefits to finishing the program all of one year sooner. Getting into the workforce or specialty training pipeline only
one year sooner is not significant in terms of salary, QOL, etc. I am not looking at all the MD school tuitions but also for vet med it does not appear to save tuition $$, partly because the schools offering it are all private anyways.
Again not advocating for an accelerated program, but also not outright dismissing it. If the curriculum is proven, I don't know that I care if a school chooses to withhold breaks from a student perspective. Keeping in mind that we aren't feeling too good about the 4-year curriculums in our established schools right now. I fully get that we are approaching degree mill territory but our OG schools are doing nothing to reign in class sizes either, they just aren't going to be able to be as aggressive with class sizes/frequency as some of the newer private schools will be. Mostly because of the physical limitations of older buildings imo. Until/unless the AVMA puts a cap on number of graduates/year, this is where we are headed. And idk if they can even do that. Being the pessimist I am, I believe the only thing holding the OG schools back from dramatic class size increases is physical space. I mean, they are increasing the class sizes with essentially no space as is. These newer schools are building their stuff with big/multiple concurrent classes in mind.
Will these schools essentially be zoom schools since these schools won’t have teaching hospitals so there’s no incentive to hire on boarded specialists?
So this is what I keep saying is going to happen at some point. I think it was Jayna that said there is currently an accreditation stipulation that students cannot be fully distance-learning, but if a future school can sue to reduce accreditation requirements who knows what's coming in the future.
Without a teaching hospital, which is arguably the hardest part of a school to design and build, you just need a few big lecture halls (or conference center-style rooms which are super easy, not even auditorium-style) and whatever labs/skills centers are required to have a vet school. It's super easy to fit several hundred people in a large room and put tables and chairs in it. It is not easy to accommodate that number in a teaching hospital, even before considering staffing the services with clinicians and techs. Classes already have to rotate through some lab/learning spaces at the OG school as is, we sure did at UofI. So they probably don't even need to make sure all of the non-didactic spaces can accommodate everyone at one time. That's theoretical though, idk how everything is actually being built of course.
