AAVMC’s Cost Comparison Tool (CCT) Updated for 2018

Washington, D.C., June 18, 2018–Selecting an academic institution and estimating the cost of financing a veterinary medical education can be a challenging task for applicants and students. To provide these future veterinarians with the data they need to make the best decisions about their education, the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) introduced the Cost Comparison Tool (CCT) in 2016.

The CCT is a powerful web-based tool that helps applicants and students process and manipulate vast amounts of information and more precisely estimate the cost of earning a DVM degree.

Newly updated and enhanced for 2018, the CCT’s interactive dashboards now allow users to research schools and use interactive filters to compare data related to tuition, projected cost-of-living, and the cost of financing one’s education.

The third edition contains several improvements, according to AAVMC Senior Director for Institutional Research and Diversity Dr. Lisa Greenhill.

  • The tool still features information on all 30 U.S. schools, but 13 international members are now included in the visualization, up from 11.
  • Five year international programs are designated, and calculations have been adjusted for the differential.
  • The tool demonstrates three levels of cost: tuition, tuition & living expenses, and total cost of attendance (TCA). The TCA includes the previous two categories as well as the cost of loan interest accruals on an assumed fully financed DVM education (the current interest rate for graduate students using the Federal Stafford Loan is 6%).
  • The sorting feature has been enhanced so that programs are generally shown from higher costs to lower cost.

The map includes resident, non-resident and international total tuition (adjusted for colleges where residency may be established after the first year) charged to the recently graduated class of 2018, the average amount of institutional scholarship aid awarded to first year professional students, the percentage of students to whom it was awarded, the cost of living for each of the participating colleges and estimated loan interest accrued on a fully financed education.

The CCT was originally developed as part of a series of AAVMC initiatives undertaken to address the educational debt issue in academic veterinary medicine. The data in the CCT has been mined from a variety of sources, including the last six years of the Comparative Data Report, surveys of AAVMC member institutions, and internal calculations.

The AAVMC is a nonprofit membership organization working to protect and improve the health and welfare of animals, people and the environment around the world by advancing academic veterinary medicine. Members include 49 accredited veterinary medical colleges in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean Basin, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico.

Contact:
Jeff Douglas
jdouglas@aavmc.org
202-371-9195 (ext. 171)