Commentary. What shortage? Veterinary education needs to move to private funding

"The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by change, what interests those whom we love the most." — Maurice Maeterlinct

I don't know who Maeterlinct was, but I'll bet he would not expect the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) to find anything they did not like in their study to forecast veterinary medicine's future, which is reported as envisioning the future in academic veterinary medicine.

The question immediately arises, which is it? The two are not the same, but neither are they divorced. The article reports that insiders like Dr. Michael Blackwell, dean of the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine, will join others of like mind to explore the historic and future models of veterinary medicine. Among the issues they will study are workforce shortages, but not any potential workforce surpluses. Academia has never acknowledged any workforce surpluses — only shortages, which will correct. Dr. Blackwell intrudes his fear of tweaking a 19th-Century model of licensing veterinarians. Where does that fit into the future of academic veterinary medicine, where veterinarians are not subject to licensing? Dr. Andrew Maccabe with AAVMC observes if we are going to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, our colleges have to be flexible.

Since I will not be one of the stakeholders invited to Atlanta, I offer the following view of the past and the future.

Referring to history, veterinarians in private practice had accomplished the transition from agricultural to urban practice within the market place by 1972 without any directives from academia or any other social agency. In 1972, the NAS-NRC Committee on Veterinary Medical Research and Education published its report as New Horizons for Veterinary Medicine. This study with a report, which eclipsed the title of the study, made one overarching recommendation — the number of small animal veterinarians should be doubled as soon as possible. The objective was quickly realized through the mechanism of insisting that if there was a shortage of health manpower, as had been asserted, then there was a shortage of veterinarians. This committee failed to recognize or disregarded the fact that the post-war consumer demands and expansion had run its course and structured their projections as if it would continue forever. The net effect was that the embryonic vertical expansion of market-driven small animal practice was stunted for decades, and in its place ensued a vast horizontal expansion of new practices engendered by new veterinary graduates who could not find employment and therefore opened new small practices. The Arthur D. Little report of 1977 documented this devastation, but academia chose to ignore or vilify this objective finding. The now-recognized specialties of dental health and animal behavior had their beginnings in the marketplace of private practice in the late 1960s, but it took academia the best part of 30 years to integrate them into the college curricula.

The changes for the 21st Century will be dictated by the need to correct the problems arising from the compounded harms associated with 20th-Century socialism and the evolution of the information age. A rational progression for understanding the evolution starts with a review of education, which is a fundamental concept of parents raising their children in a natural biological process of imprinting, mimicking and instruction. By age 18, this process is complete as the young adults assume individual adult behavior and reject further parental control in their quest to assume adult status. Society needs to recognize and accept this status of sui juris for all applications and abandon the existing obfuscation of that status. The word "education" is not applicable, nor useful, for reference to academic or training programs beyond advanced informational products, and the purchasing price needs to be recognized for what it is — an investment. In the new paradigm, this investment must be regarded for what it is — an investment that must be recovered from future professional earnings before taxes, like any other commercial investment.

This is an important concept from several important rational standpoints. It is untenable to contemplate two to 10 years of cost and expense and a lifetime without a means of recovering those investments. Under the current paradigm of multifarious grants, subsidies, scholarships, discounts, low-cost loans and subsidies, new graduates enter the profession with disparate dollar investments to be recovered after taxes creating a disadvantage to those with the smallest subsidies.

In the information age, it will be untenable and unacceptable to have large segments of production and delivery of information products owned and operated or controlled by government agencies. Therefore, veterinary colleges will need to be returned to the private, tax-paying and competitive marketplace. The same principles will need to be applied to non-profit corporations.

The paradigm of funding capital and operating research budgets under the rubric of education is flawed and needs to be rescinded. These are transformational changes that must come to pass unless our society decides to become even more socialist, which is the direction AAVMC is contemplating with central planning and control. The alternative is the free-market, competitive system that accommodates change and adjustment on a daily basis.

The facts are that there are many viable colleges and universities operating privately and independently, albeit, as non-profit institutions. Another fact is that most public colleges and universities are already moving to autonomous operations with programs in competition with private enterprise.