The future of veterinary education

Subscribe to The Vet Blast Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now that veterinary students all over the country are graduating within the next 2 months, it is an exciting time for the world of veterinary education. As the next generation of veterinarians prepare to tackle the industry, Rowan University is moving closer and closer to opening the first veterinary school in New Jersey. This initiative will help bring some of those aspiring veterinarian to the state, or keep residents pursing this career within it.

On this weeks episode, our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, is joined by Matthew Edson, DVM, CVPM, MRCVS, discuss the future of veterinary education now that New Jersey is preparing to open its first veterinary school. He explains what this means for the community in addition to why organized medicine matters to younger generations of veterinary professionals.

Below is a partial transcript.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: Finally listeners, if I could shout it from the rooftops, I'm screaming with joy, that New Jersey is getting a veterinary school! So tell the listeners about it.

Matthew Edson, DVM, CVPM, MRCVS: Well, I think you know, the importance of this as another Jersey guy, Rutgers grad, we both had to apply out of state and pay out of state tuition to go to vet school and that's not an easy thing to overcome. There's a lot of uprooting yourself. There's a lot of cost involved in that. So this is something we've really wanted to fix for New Jersey residents for a very long time. And with a national shortage of veterinarians—certainly New Jersey is no exception to that r. Bringing this to fruition has been a absolutely wonderfully rewarding process.

We've been doing this now since 2018 or 2019. Now we're into 2024. So it's a very long project. But we are just in the final stages here of our next accreditation visit, that will allow us to get approval from our creditors to go and look for applicants for this program. And as part of that, we're building our brand new complex here at Rowan University, a state public institution down in South Jersey in the beautiful town of Glassboro. So it's a very exciting project for us.