Schooling the Animals' Best Friends

What are the hottest fields in graduate professional education today? Business, law and medical schools are besieged with applicants, as usual. But the busiest admissions offices may be the ones at, of all places, veterinary schools.

Although the 21 U.S. and three Canadian schools had 2,112 first-year positions available last fall, up 8% from 1975, the ranks of would-be vets are growing even faster. While medical schools take about one in three applicants, the acceptance ratio at vet schools is about one in seven--and in many cases even lower. Alabama's Tuskegee Institute is currently screening 1,100 applicants for 50 openings in its veterinary program. Cornell has some 850 applicants for the 80 first-year places available in its vet school. At Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, which has nine applicants for each of 80 first-year positions, students frequently apply four or five times before getting in. Says Dean Leo Bustad: "Overall, it is one of the most difficult professional schools to get into."

To some extent, the vet-school crush is a reflection of the back-to-basics, return-to-the-land ethos among the post-Viet Nam young. Says Craig Williams, 29, a senior at Cornell: "I thought it was the type of profession where there would be a lot of freedom--freedom about where 1 could live and what I could do." Adds Ronald Schafer, a junior at the University of Illinois: "Most people are motivated by respect for the animal kingdom."

Poor Cousins. Young vets have little trouble finding jobs at good pay: the average starting salary for University of Illinois vet graduates in 1975 was $17,-580 for work in private industry, in such fields as pharmaceutical research. After they complete the required four years' training, the overwhelming majority of new vets go into private practice, many specializing in treating "companion animals," the nation's 60 million dogs and cats. A busy vet tending pets in Manhattan or Beverly Hills can earn $50,000 a year or more. Increasingly, however, vets are opting for what is known in the trade as a large-animal practice, which means caring for the nation's livestock industry.

Despite the surging interest in the field, vet schools are uneven in quality. They are "poor cousins," as Washington State's Bustad bluntly concedes, with aging, hand-me-down facilities, antique equipment and low budgets. Few state legislatures, which provide most of the vet schools' funds, seem willing or able to increase their aid. Yet the cost of educating a veterinarian--now $48,000 or more for the basic four-year program --has doubled in the past decade.

The schools, although financially strapped, have also managed some innovations. Ohio State has eight mobile units which specialize in caring for animals on farms. Additionally, the school has opened a new research farm to study diseased animals.

To help combat the shortage of full-fledged veterinarians, many vet schools are also offering two-year courses that turn out animal paramedics who are qualified to aid veterinarians. But as the food supply becomes more critical, more trained vets will be needed in the large-animal field. Thus some experts predict that if vet-school enrollment (now about 8,000) is not expanded soon, there could be a scarcity by 1980. Says John Welser, vet-school dean at Michigan State: "There are only 30,000 vets to protect the total food supply in this country, while we graduate 30,000 lawyers each year. Now I ask, what is the comparative cost benefit to society?"

Perhaps the veterinary schools should hire a spare lawyer or two to argue the point.

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