DISCUSS: News on Future veterinary schools

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Does anyone know what happens if fafsa is axed? Like if DT actually eliminates the department of education and fafsa doesn’t exist how would we get our loans? Through only private loan service providers like Sally Mae? What would this do to interest rates ?😅😅 I know it’s not happening immediately but this would be the difference of me being able to finish school or not so if anyone has any insight lmk
These are super valid and important questions to ask!! Doesn't matter how early. If abolishing the DOE was part of the plan, then we need to start thinking of options. I have FAFSA and private loans through my bank for undergrad. My current private loans have a 7.11% interest rate and I pay $400 a month, I can fully expect that to go up should things start to go south 🤷‍♀️

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Does anyone know what happens if fafsa is axed? Like if DT actually eliminates the department of education and fafsa doesn’t exist how would we get our loans? Through only private loan service providers like Sally Mae? What would this do to interest rates ?😅😅 I know it’s not happening immediately but this would be the difference of me being able to finish school or not so if anyone has any insight lmk
I can ask my husband what his student loan planning company said. He's in the payment stage, been out of school for a decade, but they held an emergency webinar on Wednesday with some brief updates. Of course, that would be the paying stage not the we want to go to school stage, where I'm at, but it matters too.
 
All I am going to say is, I would be very worried about economic outlook in the US if mass deportations and tarrifs go into effect. It could well make the great recession look like childs play. I've been tracking the far-right movement for a decade at this point and there is reason to be worried many of their worst impulses will be validated.

I'm also well off enough to probably be okay regardless and live in a blue state with a very proactive governor. But my husband is a first-gen Mexican immigrant, whos dad didn't come legally. Maybe things will be less bad than I expect, but I remember last term. It will get way worse.
 
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Does anyone know what happens if fafsa is axed? Like if DT actually eliminates the department of education and fafsa doesn’t exist how would we get our loans? Through only private loan service providers like Sally Mae? What would this do to interest rates ?😅😅 I know it’s not happening immediately but this would be the difference of me being able to finish school or not so if anyone has any insight lmk
Yeah, essentially youd only have private loans. The difference is private loan companies match the overall APR of the country in general. So while loan rates right now are high, they're high because loan rates for everything are high. When interest rates are low, student loan rates (either initial loan take out or refinancing) will be low. This is how things were prior to government involvement with student loans.

Federal student loans have zero ties to the country wide APR and are set arbitrarily by Congress each year with the budget.

So it's entirely possible that interest rates for private loans will actually be lower. However, the benefit of government loans were the payment and forgiveness options. You have none of that with private loans.

Not for nothing, student loans via the government are considered one of the main reasons higher education costs are going up so much and so quickly. It's likely that many smaller sized colleges that cost the same or more than state public schools would like crash and die
mass deportations and tarrifs go into effect
I'll bet my entire student loan debt I was *supposed* to have (282k) that mass deportations don't happen just like the wall didn't really happen. It's too expensive and Americans simply don't want to work those jobs; would also likely need an act of Congress to get the money and there are too many Republicans that know the numbers and are truly still fiscally conservative. There will be a show of it with easy to sell populations of immigrants like those that commit violent crimes. But I'm in doubt as to whether my husband's coworkers are the hotel are at major risk.

Tariffs are absolutely going to happen though, cause he can do that unilaterally without Congress. Eventually the population will learn though that we pay that rather than the country selling us the product.
 
Tariffs are absolutely going to happen though, cause he can do that unilaterally without Congress. Eventually the population will learn though that we pay that rather than the country selling us the product.
People underestimate how much the US can't provide its own citizens. Simple goods like bananas, coffee, sugar, other crops we can't grow well or enough of, but absolutely expect to purchase at the store without the 'do I really need this?' internal debate. Lumber. Technology. Pharmaceuticals. I could go on. The US won't be able to 'source from within' for most of what we import because we don't produce those things now, and these companies absolutely will not increase production/plants/whatever and will instead just further increase prices.

So it's entirely possible that interest rates for private loans will actually be lower. However, the benefit of government loans were the payment and forgiveness options. You have none of that with private loans.
This was the case with my private loan. The interest rate was actually significant lower, which is super attractive to those headed towards lucrative careers.

If we do go to all private loans, I'll be curious to see if applicant numbers for vet school start to drop. Part of me thinks they would for obvious reasons. The other part of me knows that the typical 22 year old prevet wants the career no matter what, because life is easy when you're 22 and haven't faced the music yet.
 
If we do go to all private loans, I'll be curious to see if applicant numbers for vet school start to drop.
I think college enrollment will sink like a rock across the board. The private sector is already dropping the need for a bachelor's degree in positions that don't actually need it. Degrees that can't guarantee a decent ROI will be cut hard.
 
Has anyone met with a lawyer yet regarding verbiage for an addendum within your contract about not being required to expected to oversee, supervise, or mentor a VPA?
 
Has anyone met with a lawyer yet regarding verbiage for an addendum within your contract about not being required to expected to oversee, supervise, or mentor a VPA?
No, pending our upcoming doctor's meeting on Wednesday, I'm going to request it be in plain English: " Will not oversee or manage VPA individuals in anyway."
 

Another veterinary school (though not AVMA accredited) taking a hit. Posting as a specific example of other countries facing their own cultural dilemmas within the industry.
I saw this eating breakfast this morning- so concerning. Not meeting 50/77 protocols😅 and this quote
“Among more serious concerns expressed by the RCVS are that the school's large animal isolation facility is not "fit for purpose," and that large animals with clinical signs requiring isolation "would automatically be euthanised."
 

Another veterinary school (though not AVMA accredited) taking a hit. Posting as a specific example of other countries facing their own cultural dilemmas within the industry.
I find it strange that some of the specified shortcomings were probably there in the 2020 inspection (paper records, questionable large animal isolation, etc).

Do we have any UK people on here?
 

The AVMA Council on Education (COE) has approved a request for voluntary withdrawal of accreditation from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, effective as of the end of this year. The notice was posted online in mid-April.

The council was originally scheduled for a comprehensive site visit March 30–April 4 to the veterinary college in Mexico City.

UNAM, founded in 1853 and said to be the oldest veterinary school in the Western Hemisphere, was granted full accreditation by the COE in March 2011 after pursuing the designation for nearly 15 years. UNAM still remains accredited by Mexico’s National Council of Education for Veterinary Medicine and Zootechnics, or CONEVET.
 
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I've been watching all of this and it's certainly interesting. I really hate the private schools jumping at the bit to get new schools, feels like a cash grab for sure. As for Arkansas (as someone who doesn't live there), I think it's interesting that the state has decided to open 2! new vet schools so quickly. Plus, I recently saw an article that the state legislature there just denied like $20 million to build a teaching hospital so definitely taking everything there with a grain of salt.

As someone who was born and raised in Orange Park, FL, I straight up have no idea why LMU is trying to bring a vet school there. If no one else has mapped it out, it's basically putting one in Jacksonville without having to pay Jax taxes since it's right below the county line. Jacksonville is less than 2 hours away from UF, so it's not even really good spacing for Floridians. Plus the city is really not well equipped to support new vet students, or more students as a whole (lack of affordable housing, etc). For the biggest city in the US by landmass, it's bum**** boring there. I'm so glad I got out.

Same with these other ones like Murray State and the Ross adjacent in Georgia. The first one I kinda get because I can see Kentucky needing it's own vet school, but I still seriously doubt that area's resources to help vet students, distributive model or not. I don't have a lot of faith in these new private 3-year vet schools, especially with student loans up in the air rn. But I guess all we can do it wait and see.

Bonus points: I am curious to see how this will affect contract seats for established vet schools. For instance, I know UGA has something like 30 seats for South Carolina, I wonder how those seats will be distributed once state legislatures figure out everything.
 
I've been watching all of this and it's certainly interesting. I really hate the private schools jumping at the bit to get new schools, feels like a cash grab for sure. As for Arkansas (as someone who doesn't live there), I think it's interesting that the state has decided to open 2! new vet schools so quickly. Plus, I recently saw an article that the state legislature there just denied like $20 million to build a teaching hospital so definitely taking everything there with a grain of salt.

As someone who was born and raised in Orange Park, FL, I straight up have no idea why LMU is trying to bring a vet school there. If no one else has mapped it out, it's basically putting one in Jacksonville without having to pay Jax taxes since it's right below the county line. Jacksonville is less than 2 hours away from UF, so it's not even really good spacing for Floridians. Plus the city is really not well equipped to support new vet students, or more students as a whole (lack of affordable housing, etc). For the biggest city in the US by landmass, it's bum**** boring there. I'm so glad I got out.

Same with these other ones like Murray State and the Ross adjacent in Georgia. The first one I kinda get because I can see Kentucky needing it's own vet school, but I still seriously doubt that area's resources to help vet students, distributive model or not. I don't have a lot of faith in these new private 3-year vet schools, especially with student loans up in the air rn. But I guess all we can do it wait and see.

Bonus points: I am curious to see how this will affect contract seats for established vet schools. For instance, I know UGA has something like 30 seats for South Carolina, I wonder how those seats will be distributed once state legislatures figure out everything.
UF’s large animal hospital also doesn’t even have a large enough case load to sustain itself already.
 
UF’s large animal hospital also doesn’t even have a large enough case load to sustain itself already.
When schools farm out clinics to private entities, they don’t have to care about caseload. I mean yes there’s some regulations regarding availability of clinical resources in regards to COE approval and accreditation, but if you didn’t see many cases or have a good experience, they’ll likely say you chose it and you should have picked something different. I went to a school with a hospital but they asked zero questions about where I chose to do my mandatory offsite rotations other than the place and who was the supervising vet. They had zero cares about those weeks aside from whether the supervisor filled out the pass/fail form.
 
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“Zero cares” …. ????

Is that code for something else? Like a different phrase?

lol
 
I've been watching all of this and it's certainly interesting. I really hate the private schools jumping at the bit to get new schools, feels like a cash grab for sure. As for Arkansas (as someone who doesn't live there), I think it's interesting that the state has decided to open 2! new vet schools so quickly. Plus, I recently saw an article that the state legislature there just denied like $20 million to build a teaching hospital so definitely taking everything there with a grain of salt.

As someone who was born and raised in Orange Park, FL, I straight up have no idea why LMU is trying to bring a vet school there. If no one else has mapped it out, it's basically putting one in Jacksonville without having to pay Jax taxes since it's right below the county line. Jacksonville is less than 2 hours away from UF, so it's not even really good spacing for Floridians. Plus the city is really not well equipped to support new vet students, or more students as a whole (lack of affordable housing, etc). For the biggest city in the US by landmass, it's bum**** boring there. I'm so glad I got out.

Same with these other ones like Murray State and the Ross adjacent in Georgia. The first one I kinda get because I can see Kentucky needing it's own vet school, but I still seriously doubt that area's resources to help vet students, distributive model or not. I don't have a lot of faith in these new private 3-year vet schools, especially with student loans up in the air rn. But I guess all we can do it wait and see.

Bonus points: I am curious to see how this will affect contract seats for established vet schools. For instance, I know UGA has something like 30 seats for South Carolina, I wonder how those seats will be distributed once state legislatures figure out everything.
I have nothing to add to this other than hey, I'm also from Jax and glad to not be there anymore (though I do love the zoo) 😂
 
Starting with the class of 2029, AVC is implementing mandatory provincial agreements for incoming students, which are intended to help with the severity of the shortage in the Maritimes. For example, NS has a return to service agreement that will require all their admitted students to come back & practice in NS for an equivalent of 3 years full time employment.

I'm curious as to whether you guys think with all the new vet schools opening up, some U.S. institutions may implement similar policies? I was thinking about this as I read this thread especially with the unevenness of the vet shortage.
 
Starting with the class of 2029, AVC is implementing mandatory provincial agreements for incoming students, which are intended to help with the severity of the shortage in the Maritimes. For example, NS has a return to service agreement that will require all their admitted students to come back & practice in NS for an equivalent of 3 years full time employment.

I'm curious as to whether you guys think with all the new vet schools opening up, some U.S. institutions may implement similar policies? I was thinking about this as I read this thread especially with the unevenness of the vet shortage.
The VMLRP loan repayment program in the US does require you to commit three years to an underserved rural area. It’s been that way for many years. Same for the military vet med positions in the US…you get a scholarship or they pay your way or reimburse you in some way, and you owe them a certain number of years of service. But it’s voluntary to apply to these programs and if you don’t like the terms, you just don’t apply. From what I understand from being here on SDN for years is that Canadians can go to school in their province only or to a contract seat. But in the US, often half or more of a class is out of state students. Because of that, while I’d never say never, I think there’s enough of a cultural difference in regards to admissions culture and OOS options that it would be unlikely to work as well in the US. If people don’t want to return to their home state, they could just theoretically go to one of the many OOS programs…Canadians don’t have that luxury so it’s a bit different.
 
I'm curious as to whether you guys think with all the new vet schools opening up, some U.S. institutions may implement similar policies? I was thinking about this as I read this thread especially with the unevenness of the vet shortage.

I agree with Jayna on the cultural aspect. The US is just so individualistic that a school outright stating attendees will be required to live in such-and-such location in order to attend wouldnt happen. 1) How do you enforce this? And 2) There are easier ways to do this like prioritizing specific students. Texas Tech is a good recent example. Their initial class (and those since I think) are only Texas and NM residents. Makes it easier to funnel people to TX and NM as the majority of people go back "home". Maybe no necessarily their town or even county. But at least their state.

However, the maldistribition of vets (I don't agree there's a shortage; I argue there's a distribution problem) is primarily rural vs suburban/urban. Unless you do what is already being done, you can't force people to practice a specific type of practice.
 
It also makes a lot more sense for the Canadian schools to do it this way since tuition is heavily subsidized by the provincial governments.

BC gave 8 million dollars to the regional vet school each year while I was a student, and at that time there was 80 students (20 in each year) from that provincial pool. That came out to ~100k/student/year, or ~400k/student over the course of their education. Tuition students paid at that time was about 12k annually.

ETA: As Jayna said, at this point a Canadian applicant can only apply to 1 school since every province only has agreements with one of the schools and you cannot apply where your province does not give money.
 
It also makes a lot more sense for the Canadian schools to do it this way since tuition is heavily subsidized by the provincial governments.

BC gave 8 million dollars to the regional vet school each year while I was a student, and at that time there was 80 students (20 in each year) from that provincial pool. That came out to ~100k/student/year, or ~400k/student over the course of their education. Tuition students paid at that time was about 12k annually.

It's one of the big arguments for/against subsidized higher education overall:
- On one hand, such cheap tuition would mean I would've paid off my loans already
- On the other, this artificially limits the pool of students directly because finances are a finite resource and only so many students can attend veterinary school. Schools wouldn't have to rely on so many OOS students to pay the bills.

Having such a system in the US would be interesting for sure. It would honestly probably mean I would have never become a vet.
 
It's one of the big arguments for/against subsidized higher education overall:
- On one hand, such cheap tuition would mean I would've paid off my loans already
- On the other, this artificially limits the pool of students directly because finances are a finite resource and only so many students can attend veterinary school. Schools wouldn't have to rely on so many OOS students to pay the bills.

Having such a system in the US would be interesting for sure. It would honestly probably mean I would have never become a vet.
It certainly is a bit of a different application approach.

Most people apply multiples times. I had people in my class who applied 5 or 6 times until they managed to get in. Because some provincial pools are more competitive than others, people would also move provinces just to get residency for application purposes. My GPA average got my a 2nd round (likely very bottom of second round) interview in BC (previously a very competitive province), whereas if I was from Saskatchewan I probably would have had a first round interview.

My school briefly had non-sponsored and international seats (~75k/year tuition) when the inter-provincial agreement with Alberta fell apart. Fortunately they only did that for 2 years before the other provinces picked up the slack and covered the cost of the 20 Alberta seats for students from their provinces. I think BC actually has 40 seats a year now, which is double what it was when I was a student.

A lot of people I went to undergrad with or worked with in pre-vet ended up going internationally (UK, Australia, New Zealand are very common) for school after not getting into the their Canadian school for a few years.
 
Most people apply multiples times. I had people in my class who applied 5 or 6 times until they managed to get in.

Do y'all apply to vet school out of high school like most of the rest of the world? Or is your system more similar to the US where you do a full bachelor's degree and then professional school?
 
Do y'all apply to vet school out of high school like most of the rest of the world? Or is your system more similar to the US where you do a full bachelor's degree and then professional school?
I did two years of undergrad & then applied! Two years is really the minimum you can do & complete all the course requirements, so I think relatively similar to the U.S. in that way.
 
I did two years of undergrad & then applied! Two years is really the minimum you can do & complete all the course requirements, so I think relatively similar to the U.S. in that way.

My big thing on the repeat applications is the time. If the system makes it so difficult that many/most applicants are taking many years to get into school, that may tank the number of applicants to vet school in the US. I know I had a hard limit of 3 cycles. So if y'all do a full 4 year bachelor's on average, then an additional 3-5 years to get into vet school on average, that's a hard sell to me.

On the other hand, you're also not nearly as worried about the missed financial time either.
 
Do y'all apply to vet school out of high school like most of the rest of the world? Or is your system more similar to the US where you do a full bachelor's degree and then professional school?

My big thing on the repeat applications is the time. If the system makes it so difficult that many/most applicants are taking many years to get into school, that may tank the number of applicants to vet school in the US. I know I had a hard limit of 3 cycles. So if y'all do a full 4 year bachelor's on average, then an additional 3-5 years to get into vet school on average, that's a hard sell to me.

On the other hand, you're also not nearly as worried about the missed financial time either.

No, we apply out of undergrad. Depending on the school, there are different requirements. For my school you had to have a minimum of 2 years undergrad to meet the requirements but most people took more. In my class of 79, I think about 8-10 people came in after 2 years? I started after 3 years of undergrad since I spread out the requirements to fit in some extra fluff classes and boost my GPA. The majority of people coming in have 4+ years and their degree. Some people have masters/PhD before coming in, similar to US.

Also remember that vet salaries in Canada are lower than the US (esp when you factor in USD-CAD conversion). As a private practice resident in the US right now I'm making more than almost all my classmates made at graduation if you factor in the conversion. Salaries have gone way up in the past few years, but most people I know moving to the US to practice are doing so for strictly financial reasons. That is part of the reason I am planning to stay in the US after residency (unless I decide to jump ship and move to AUS).
 
Makes sense! Kinda even shows the extreme situation where salaries are a major reason for what's driving the maldistribition of vets.
 
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