One of my sons is wanting a career in veterinary medicine. Assume, for the sake of discussion, that he gets the grades and the experience required to gain acceptance in a vet school, and that he and we can handle the cost of the education … anyone know what the current job market is like for veterinarians?
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/veterinarians.htm
$84k a year.
To become a veterinarian :
-
3-4 years of college, and you need top shelf grades. Anything less than near-perfect, and your son will not get in to veterinary school. Medical school is much easier.
-
4 years Vet school, with a curriculum similar in difficulty to medical school, which is infamous for being quite difficult and labor intensive.
-
1 year internship, 2-3 years residency.
In no possible world is this even in the same ballpark of other options your son would have, at least economically speaking. If he can get perfect grades needed to get into vet school, he can probably also become some type of engineer - where after a 4 year degree or a master’s he’ll swiftly be making more than the median salary for a veterinarian.
Or, with the kind of grades you need to go to vet school, he could get into a top 14 law school or a top 10 business school (the TLDR about law/business schools is they are mediocre investments unless you are accepted to a top 14 one, but are excellent investments if you are).
Or medical school.
And so on. The only reason to become a vet is if he likes animals…many of whom will be terminally ill, sick, in distress, etc, so much that he would be happy doing nothing else. Among other duties, he’ll have to kill animals when necessary.
I personally choose medical school when confronted with this choice. I had the grades and exam scores, and law/business are heavily dependent on “soft” social skills that can’t be objectively measured and influenced by factors you can’t really improve upon. (your race, your height and build, your facial structure all factor in and are beyond your control)
On the bright side, you don’t necessarily need to have a sit down right away. He’ll always have better options if he earns top shelf grades in his first 3 years of college, no matter the ultimate professional school he applies to. That’s what he should focus on.
What type of veterinarian? Are you talking about a city veterinarian who treats cats and dogs–or a rural veterinarian treating hogs and cattle?
A friend of mine was a large-animal veterinarian (he’s retired now). He started his studies and practice on small animals (dogs and cats and guinea pigs), then got into larger animals (horses and cattle).
He tells me that there aren’t that many differences between mammals. All mammals (even humans) share the same basic physiology–lungs, kidneys, stomachs, skeletal and nervous systems, etc. Differences do occur (cows have four stomachs, cats have a Jacobson’s organ, a horse’s hoof is an overdeveloped third finger), but we’re pretty much the same creatures.
There are species-specific diseases–we humans cannot catch feline leukemia (which is transmissible between cats), for example; nor can we catch our cats’ colds. Nowadays, there is a feline leukemia vaccine, but there wasn’t always–I lost a cat to that back in the 1980s. Naturally, veterinarians need to know about those.
I cannot comment on the job market, but I do know that at the vet clinic where I take my cats, both vets are younger than I am. It would seem to me that as long as we have companion animals, we will need veterinarians.
I don’t know what the job market for vets is like in the US, but I know it’s pretty terrible for newly qualified vets in the UK. Working at a zoo, we often got trainee vets on placement, who tended to keep in touch.
The commonest employment for newly qualified vets here is the slaughterhouses. Checking cows on the way in or slabs of meat for disease signs, conveyor belt style.
Apparently the drop-out rate for new vets is so high, that the vets everyone thinks they’ll be working for, especially small animal clinics, barely ever employ anyone who hasn’t already done the job for a while. All the really young vets at our local clinic are actually on poorly paid (if paid at all) placements, not hired.
Like I said, I don’t know what it’s like getting in round your area, and some of the trainees we had through have made it into their dream job, especially a few who really specialised, but a lot more made it through all the training, qualified, and are either stuck with a job they hate, or have just dropped out of the field altogether. I haven’t checked the truth of the stat, but one of them did tell me that the suicide rate among veterinarians is one of the highest among any professions in the UK.
It may be a largely UK problem, as the UK has a lot of newly qualified people coming over from poorer European countries, in some of which veterinary science is not seen as a top grade subject, (we had a Spanish guy on a placement to improve his English last year who had had nothing like the grades to get into a UK course, but had qualified in Spain), which is making it tougher, but there’s no doubting it’s a tough field.
The job market is not good, and there is quite a discussion about it in several organizations, including AVMA and others. Perhaps by the time your son finishes school and is ready to go to veterinary medicine, the situation will be different.
Exception: Veterinarians DO NOT need internships or residencies in order to practice. They can start private practice right away after graduating with a DVM (unlike in human medicine). Only IF they want to specialize do they need a residency (and usually internship, but there are exceptions).
Once I have a break and more reliable connections I can look up something more substantial.
(Of note, I’m a veterinarian. There are a few others on Dope, but they’re not as regular posters.)
Years ago my daughter had veterinary medicine on her list and I helped her research her options. The return on investment was horrible, and was a deal breaker for her. (She got her bachelors in nursing and is a great pediatric nurse today)
If he really wants to be a vet, and loves animals, then he should absolutely do it. But that’s the only reason to do it, I think.
ISTR reading in the last couple of years that the demand in the US for rural large animal vets exceeds the supply. Conversely, the supply for suburban doggy and kitty vets far exceeds the demand.
So if the OP’s son wants to live rural and tend to farm critters there oughta be an OK-to-good living in it. Plus the fact the cost of living is generally cheaper out in the sticks.
My “experience” of the following comes just from TV plus some farm-related magazines, so discount accordingly.
But AIUI tending to farm critters is a lot more about making economic decisions about cost of care versus marginal profit potential of the individual animal, whereas pet car is a lot more like human care, about expending effort in the service of compassion to the all-but exclusion of economic factors. That difference may really alter the relative attractiveness of the two careers for any given would-be practitioner.
Thanks for the responses so far.
Not rural.
Maybe exotics/zoo medicine, maybe regular small animal vet, wouldn’t rule out a subspecialty.
The “likes animals” part … seems to me, and to the vets I know in real life, that dealing with people is as much of the job as is human medicine, just the pet owners or in zoos with the political structures. One vet friend felt she would have a harder time losing a human patient than an animal one. My son explicitly recognizes that the career is not really something to do because one loves animals, as much as one loves all about them.
In terms of getting in … yes grades-wise I understand is comparable between med school and vet school with the big difference being the much greater importance and weighting of experience and letters of recommendation on the vet side.
Not sure what he is going to do. He finished his first semester of his sophomore year at a small New England liberal arts college and was a)not enjoying it there and b)unsure what direction he wanted to go from here, from pre-vet to pre-med to animation (yeah, a pretty wide range and he also wants to take from literature to more history to advanced physics out of interest; he has to narrow his focus some I think). He decided to take this semester off and figure out a place to transfer to and it looks like he has scored himself a job working at a large chain animal hospital (VCA). That is pretty golden if ends up wanting vet as a career as there might be another of them near where ever he ends up next in school and job transfers between them are common. Keeping up experience and earning some decent letters will be vital in a vet school application.
You should do what you love if you can and if he thinks, after these next few months working in a corporate veterinary hospital setting (assuming the job does come through), that that is what he wants I am all for it, even if I think human medicine, with all its options, makes more sense. But boy I’d feel better having confidence that if (“when”!) he managed to make it in he could find a good job market on the other side.
He does appreciate that the ROI is horrible. But then it is no longer so hot on the MD side; from the ROI perspective someone thinking human medicine has to at least seriously consider a PA or NP program instead.
Thanks again for the help so far!
Vet care is also pretty economy dependant. When times get tough one of the first things mny families cut back on is health care for their pets. When time are good, they tend to return.
Here is a good look at the situation from the American Animal Hospital Association (WARNING: PDF):
My cousin is a DVM, and he works for the state as a veterinary pathologist. He was in private practice for a while, but didn’t really enjoy it.
He also has some serious health issues, so a job like this was the right thing for him.
Interestingly, 80 to 90% of new graduates are women. 
It’s really **much **harder to get into a vet school. As one anecdote, my wife applied to vet school with all of:
- Several years’ experience volunteering in vet clinics in high school and college.
- Graduating from a small, elite liberal arts school, with honors and a 3.4 GPA.
- Two years working as a surgery technician for the head vet of a world-class research institute.
- A master’s degree in animal science from a good state university, with a 4.0 GPA.
- A first-author research publication from the master’s thesis.
- And a fist-full of glowing recommendation letters from every step along the way.
After all of that, she got on the waitlist at one vet school. Nothing she did was enough to overcome a less-than-perfect undergraduate transcript.
I know a few other people who were rejected from vet school, who later gave up on vet school and went to a top-ranked med school.
I’ve always heard that it’s perceived as a medical career path that is more family-friendly than becoming an MD.
My daughter is a vet, and after five years as a small animal vet is not making $84,000, but she doesn’t live in LA or New York.
I don’t think the job market is wonderful. It wasn’t when she graduated five years ago and some in her class still didn’t have jobs for a couple of months after graduation. It was funny (funny strange, not ha-ha funny as my mother used to say) because the newspapers were full of articles at that time about the wonderful prospects for vets and I knew it wasn’t true.
I don’t think it’s the animal part, but the people part that’s most difficult for her. Just like in any job where you work with the public, you meet a lot of difficult people.
And I think veterinary medicine is almost all female now, so he will be a popular guy!
FWIW, I understand that the job market for zoo or exotic vets is even worse than in small animal clinics. Most zoos just can’t afford to pay high salaries.
The other major career path is lab animal medicine. It’s much more solid as a career choice, but that’s since it’s not a popular option. Turns out it’s really hard to balance compassion and the fact that most of your job is to make animals sick so others can research the pathobiology and experimental treatments. None of the “YAAAY HORSIES AND PUPPIES!” crowd wants that job. In the long run it’s for the greater good, but that doesn’t change the fact that today you have to cause a simulated stroke in twelve rats.
[Clearing misconceptions part]
Not the complete picture. Many corporate farms do hire their own veterinarians, who are also specialized and do a lot of husbandry/management, not just medicine. So it’s not as if they need a lot of vets when just a few can handle large operations.
As well, truly rural areas cannot afford to pay the minimum needed for a veterinarian to be able to pay back her/his student loans. So if the veterinarian wants to have a middle to upper middle class lifestyle, she/he really needs to make a lot more than what the rural community could offer, just because the need to pay back student loans.
Oh my, that is the worst. Unless he comes to the dark side and becomes a pathologist. I get pleeeenty more wildlife and exotic cases that way than many of my colleagues who went to vet school to become “exotic vets”. And sometimes they’re even alive (and I get to aid in prognosis!).
The ROI is still better for human medicine because the cost of attendance is not that different from human medicine, yet the starting salaries, even during residency/internship, are vastly inferior. My doctor friends complained about how little they made in their internships… “Oh, we just made $45K”… while I was one of the lucky few path residents who cracked over $30K per year, before taxes. Many did with less.
nearwildheaven, yes it is mostly female, why the 
? The big shots are still male and white. Also, it is one of the whitest professions (probably due to the cost of attendance as well). One of my mentors recently received an award for her continuous effort to increase diversity in her veterinary school.
lazybratsche, unfortunately I’m not sure how it works, but sometimes the recommendations are not as good as one may think they are (I speak from experience and what I’ve been told by others). Also, you still have to take and ace the GRE or MCAT. Finally, there is usually, in many places, an interview process, and perhaps she didn’t come (for whatever reason) among their top choices (that part is subjective).
They’re smoking something, whoever told you that. Yes, the training hours are relatively less brutal than the human counterpart, but once in private practice, I think the hours are as bad or more brutal, than human medicine.
And despite being mostly women graduating in the field, last I checked, there still was a gender gap between male and female veterinarians.
Pai325 is correct, dealing with people is a lot of what veterinarians have to do. They suffer from compassion fatigue, and they have higher odds than other health careers to commit suicide.
Lab animal medicine is not popular not because it doesn’t deal with cats and dogs (it can!), but because it is freaking hard. It is one of the hardest specializations to get in and was famously one with the lowest passing rates for its certification. And actually, a lot of what they do does not have to do with causing damage to animals. On the contrary, they have to make sure that a study using animals is using them properly, using the minimum amount necessary to be statistical significant, and everything is ensured so that the animals are treated as best as possible and euthanized accordingly. They do not deal with causing the simulated stroke. They’re not the ones doing that. They make sure the animals are well cared for, healthy, free of diseases, and oversee that if they get a stroke, they either get the treatment (if they’re studying a treatment), or they get euthanized properly. In short, they get paid more for knowing a whole lot of stuff rather than they themselves doing a lot of stuff.
Also note that lab animal medicine is different from pathologists. As further hijack, please DO NOT accept any science news that has used animals in which the research was not backed and supervised by certified lab animal vets and where the lesions were not examined and catalogued properly by a certified veterinary (not even human!) pathologist.
[/clearing misconceptions hijack ends]
Loving animals and “really wanting to be a vet” are still not good enough reasons to do it. (And by the way, don’t all prospective vets all say they “love animals?” I don’t see an animal hater getting into the profession.)
Here, for instance, is an article about how tough it is for veterinarians today. According to the article, there are too many veterinarians (and the schools are even increasing the number of students in their programs). The median cost for out-of-state tuition, room and board and fees is $63,000 per year while the starting salaries are about $46,000 per year. Debt-to-income ratios are twice that for doctors. And the total number of pets is decreasing.
Someone upthread suggested that veterinary medicine might be more family-friendly than human medicine. But I think even human medicine can be reasonably family friendly; most doctors work for a hospital or in a group practice and alternate on-call duty.
As a (not currently working) member of the veterinary medical community, the idea that it’s more “family-friendly” than human medicine is laughable. Often, vet offices are open more hours than MD offices, and you sometimes have to work the entire 7AM - 7PM shift if your replacement doesn’t come in or you don’t have one. Not to mention weekends - most vets are open at least part of the day on Saturday. If your hospital offers boarding, they usually need extra staff to assist on holidays and peak vacation times. Lower pay, less paid time off, fewer benefits …
you with the face has a DVM. Vets don’t just work on doggies and kitties. They also work in public health, which is her specialty