July 8, 2004

By Bennie Osburn

AAVMC's Legislative Associate, Dr. Richard Dierks continues to work with AAVMC members to get an accurate idea of the outcomes to be obtained from the Human Resource Initiative. The projections are that the number of new admits will decrease per million population unless action is taken. Our recent survey indicates that the colleges are planning to increase the number of students by 226 and the number of graduate students by 632. Two hundred and twenty six is too few to maintain a level of 8-9 students per million population. We need to increase the number of graduates by 300 to 500 per year if we hope to meet critical human resource needs in many areas in veterinary medicine. For example, the main way to increase the number of veterinarians in graduate education and post DVM training programs is to increase the number of graduating veterinarians. Do we need to think our enrollment intentions?

Projected Population Growth vs. 1st Year Veterinary Student Numbers