Which supports my point. If you take a year off to establish residency somewhere else you are a year behind. If you dont get in the first time, you are then 2 years behind.
If you delay vet school by 2 years just so you don't have to pay OOS tuition rates the difference in education costs is pretty much offset by lost wages at that point.
Telling someone to move somewhere to get IS tuition essentially limits yourself to one school which goes against the advice everyone else on here gives about applying to multiple schools.
The middle section is not true. Say you get a job vet related or non-vet related for a year. Say you get paid 30K after taxes, live frugally, and save 15-20K of that. Then you either 1) invest that 15-20K in a decent mutual fund that yields 8-12% or you put that 15-20K towards your first year (which will pay for tuition for most schools instate...I'm not counting living expenses, books, supplies, etc). The amount of money you'll either make in interest from the mutual fund or save in interest by paying for vet school in cash is something that will beat getting out of school a year or two earlier in the long run.
That's actually part of the reason why people who are entrepreneurs and who invest smart and save smart early in their life (like early 20s) typically can build a LOT more wealth over the course of their life than say a doctor who makes 300K a year. They get started early and often and rely on the beauty of sound investment return. Doctors (and veterinary doctors) come out of school often needing to do internships, residencies, etc and they are in their early to mid 30s before they can start making a lot of money. An entrepreneur or smart businessman in their 20s can make fast because of smart investing. For more on this principle, try the books
The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach,
Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey, and
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko.
And unless your spouse is raking it in so your whole salary goes toward paying off your student loans, that one extra year of 60K isn't going towards paying the 100K+ disparity in IS versus out of state. It's going towards the 300K+ principle plus interest you'll probably end up paying by the time you're done. Have fun with that.
I also find it
highly unlikely that if you got in straight away OOS the first time that they would reject you IS the second time, especially with an additional year of real world experience if you got a vet/research/etc sort of job and/or volunteering experience. I'll give you an example. I was looking into do that for Colorado State. For the entering class this last year, 246 ISers applied and 75 were admitted. That's a 30% chance. Alright, not great, but not bad. For non-sponsored (and Missouri, where I'm a resident at, is of course not sponsored as we have our own CVM), there were 1146 (!!!) apply and only 19 got in. That's a 1.6% chance. Hmmmm...I wonder which is the better strategy...
Anyways, I didn't say just move wherever just to go wherever. I'm saying if you *really*
REALLY want to go somewhere as your dream school, you do what you have to do to get it done. I said the smart thing to do financial wise is to apply to your IS or contract schools and then if you want to take advantage of a cool program elsewhere, do it on a summer or a preceptor block so you can have the cool experience while still paying IS tuition.
I also am not one of those folks who advocate applying to every single school out there either. I did that for undergrad (applied to 10 schools and got into 11, thanks Vanderbilt!). But it boiled down to where could I realistically go and that list was trimmed significantly. I think you should apply to schools that you will be fairly certain you'll be happy at and fairly certain you'll get into and limit it to that. It's not like in undergrad where there's a huge disparity between Harvard and Metro Tech Community College. You'll get a decent veterinary education wherever you go. Even though it currently seems like it's taking forever, it's only a little over 3.5 years of your life in one place. Otherwise all that applying and interviewing across the country to more than a small number of schools gets highly stressful and expensive. JMHO.
