I heard somewhere that it’s harder to get into veterinary school than is is medical school. Any truth to this?
There’s only 28 Vet schools in the U.S. The nationwide acceptance rate is 46%
Is that low? I really don’t know.
Apparently it’s identical to med school acceptances:
http://www.vault.com/nr/newsmain.jsp?ch_id=619&article_id=27653519&cat_id=3232
I have no problem believing it is true but, as pointed out earlier, it doesn’t have to be because veterinary medicine training is so hard, it is because the competition for slots is disproportionate low number of slots. That causes extreme competition for the students that want to go into the field. I don’t want to minimize their skills. Vets usually work with several different types of animals and M.D.'s with only one. Vets are skilled medical medical professionals who can often do complex surgeries and they often get payed only a fraction of the money of their counterparts that work on humans.
All of this is just supply and demand. If schools built more veterinary schools, the competition would not be so intense. We have a prestigious veterinary school in the Boston area and it is run by Tufts University. They have an actual hospital not far from where I live that functions 24/7 just like a regular hospital would. It is just that the waiting room at 3am (which we needed once) is filled with things like poodles being held because of lacerations or others needing to go on life support in the intensive care unit.
There are other ways to quantify “harder.” For instance, virtually no vet school will consider you without at least some hands-on down-n-dirty animal care experience, such as working as a vet tech, vet ride-alongs, hands-on work at an animal shelter, etc. Something that exposes you to the filthy, depressing, thankless part of being a vet.
My son, who is now a senior at the U of I, started out as Pre-Vet, but when his grades looked like they weren’t going to make it, switched over to Pre-Pharmacy. We did extensive research, and yes, it is harder to get into vet school than into med school. The schools can afford to be picky, AND not only do you have to have a perfecto-mundo GPA, you also sometimes have to have actual, documented experience working with animals, plus sometimes a letter of recommendation from someone. We were, like, “Day-um, he just thought it would be kewl to be a zoo vet…”
Are vet schools considered costly (to universities)? I’m wondering why there’s so few in to the United States to the point of them having to decline over half of the applicants. Surely the demand is there, and it seems that a university establishing a school of veterinary medicine would easily result in always having a full set of students (and more funds for the school).
It is generally more difficult to get into vet school in Canada, but again, it’s a matter of numbers. There are only 4 vet schools, the largest of which (Guelph) only takes 110 students. The other schools, Saskatchewan, Université de Montréal, and University of PEI take about 70, 100 and 60 students respectively (last I heard).
Vet school is also quite expensive; you not only have to provide the classrooms, teachers, etc for the students, but you also need to have dogs, cats, horses, cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, and who knows how many other animals on hand for the students to work with daily, which all require housing, exercise, feeding, medical care (done by the students when possible, but supplies and medicines cost money too), etc. And these animals aren’t cheap, since they are most often bred especially for animal testing (like it or not, the students have to learn on a real animal!), and therefore have a whole known lineage and fully documented everything-ever-pertinant-to-it. The beagles at UPEI cost the school several thousand each, and at the end of their service life (about 5 years) they are adopted out for free. Setting up a new school is a very expensive endeavour!
Easy enough, just qualify as a 68T and you will be working in the field of animal care. You will also have your education paid for while you go to college. When you complete your degree, you may have the opportunity to become an Officer in the Medical field.
If you want to know if you qualify, PM me and I will address some specific issues.
SSG Schwartz
I traveled with a friend to Louisiana State University (LSU) to see what they had to offer for animal sciences. He was especially interested in poultry science even though they have a great veterinary school as well. The resources they have are daunting. There are the full veterinary parts with Ph.D professors but they also have large working farms close to the campus where students can learn domestic stock management ranging from cattle to turkeys.
They even have rustic farm houses that the students need to live in instead of dorms. They have to wake up as called between 3am and 5am depending on their specialty and get to work and then go to classes. It sounded like hell on earth for a night person like me but that is what some students want to do and they make sure that every student wants to live the lifestyle that it takes. I can see why it would be too expensive to have those programs for most schools. It isn’t the same as just adding a few classes to create a new major.
When I was living in San Diego it was about as difficult as Med school.
Here in Mexico it’s almost painfully easy, it’s harder to get into History than veterinary school.