Programs focus on hiring part-timers, sharing personnel, promoting academic lifestyle
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Faculty Shortage Art .jpg
A surge in new veterinary schools. Record-high enrollment. A long-standing migration of specialists to the private sector.
Converging trends have created a heightened demand for veterinary educators in the United States that's anticipated to intensify. So far, no one reports effects on education quality, but academics across the country describe worrisome signs in the form of clinical service delays at teaching hospitals and full-time faculty overburdened from picking up the slack when job openings go chronically unfilled.
The conditions are pushing established and new schools alike to think creatively and consider unconventional arrangements as they strategize on how to attract and retain faculty.
Dr. Dirk Vanderwall is deeply familiar with the challenge. He is dean of Utah State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, which just expanded from a two-year program partnered with the veterinary school at Washington State University into a stand-alone four-year, degree-granting program. As such, Utah State will need to approximately double the size of its full-time faculty.
Utah's approach is to create malleable job descriptions.
"We needed to look at any and all options for flexibility," Vanderwall said. "If someone wants to have the opportunity to work part-time ... we'll work to create a position that fills the needs and interests of individuals like that." For example, the college offered a position to a practitioner who would also work at a specialty practice in Salt Lake City, some 80 miles south of the school campus in Logan.
The pressure on academia has been building for decades. Veterinary academics are often board-certified specialists. Teaching hospitals used to be the primary places where they could expect to access cutting-edge equipment and practice the latest in their specialty.
But over the last several decades, demand has blossomed for specialty services outside of academia, giving specialists opportunities to earn more money and choose from a wider variety of places to live. Meanwhile, the profession isn't producing specialists interested in academia fast enough to replenish academic ranks.
The number of faculty at veterinary schools in the U.S. isn't shrinking. It's actually growing incrementally. However, the number of veterinary programs is also increasing. Additionally, the rate of faculty growth is far outpaced by growth in the overall student population. American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges figures show that veterinary faculty grew by 476 during the past decade, from 4,171 in 2015 to 4,647 in 2025. That's an increase of 11.4%. During the same period, the number of enrolled students mushroomed from 12,395 to 16,143, an increase of 30.2%.
Additional research from the AAVMC found that in the fall of 2023, there were 474 full-time equivalent educator roles funded but unfilled across its U.S. member institutions. With more than 10 schools proposed, scheduled to open this year or opened in the past year, the number of needed faculty is poised to increase substantially.
The potential impact of a future dearth of faculty on the day-to-day experiences of students is difficult to capture. However, if the shortage trend continues, it could have direct consequences for schools pursuing or attempting to maintain accreditation, according to a 2024 paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. To get or stay accredited, schools must have sufficient qualified educators. Students who graduate from unaccredited schools do not qualify to take the national veterinary licensing examination without first going through a separate and expensive testing process to demonstrate proficiency.
Data and anecdotal accounts alike indicate that the difficulty in recruiting and retaining educator faculty is unlikely to abate any time soon.
"This is an important topic," Vanderwall said, "one we are right in the middle of."
Remote consults, shared appointments
Dr. Ashley Smith, a veterinary oncologist, recently left an academic post for a role in a specialty practice.
She had loved her work but felt frustrated by the slow pace. Some of this was due to the nature of a teaching hospital, where practice is slower to allow for instruction.
But staffing gaps made it worse. "Because of the shortage of faculty, there's so many bottlenecks throughout the hospital that I feel like we can only see a certain volume of patients," she said shortly before she changed jobs, enabling her to put more focus on patient care.
She noted that faculty must take on extra work as a result of unfilled roles. "Sometimes your responsibilities are more overarching than they would be if you were fully staffed," she said.
She acknowledged that schools are in a tough situation and described one measure her former institution took to try to fill a gap: It hired an out-of-state radiologist to provide remote consultations.
Recounting how it worked, she said: "They're sitting there on the screen, talking to the interns and residents and walking them through radiographs. If I have a question about a patient, I can come down, and I see [the radiologist's] face, and we can talk about all of the imaging as if he's here."
The set-up isn't perfect, she said, "but I do respect that they're trying to reach out and do more things like that."
Part-time appointments are another way programs are filling needed roles. An AAVMC survey found in 2024 that more than 70% of schools that responded had, at some point in the previous decade, employed clinical specialists who were simultaneously employed in the private sector.
The study found the approach wasn't without challenges. Common issues included scheduling conflicts and the fact that part-time faculty don't shoulder the same academic duties as full-time staff, such as serving on committees.
Faculty sharing can also happen among academic institutions. Dr. Michael Lairmore, a former dean of the veterinary school at the University of California, Davis, described positive experiences in informal sharing. To expand schools' access to expertise in veterinary nutrition, for example, he said, "We formed a consortium with other schools and colleges. Our nutritionists would go to those schools and colleges and teach."
Lairmore, who was the lead author of the JAVMA article about the faculty shortage, suggested that the concept could be scaled up and implemented nationwide in a more formal "matching program."
"We do that informally, in small areas across the consortium," he said. "But if we were better organized across the nation, we probably could do a better job than that."
Sharing resources is exactly what some of the newer schools are considering, according to Dr. Robert Murtaugh, founding dean of Rocky Vista University College of Veterinary Medicine. The Montana school is projected to open to its first class in 2027.
Murtaugh said that many of the founding deans of new schools are banding together to discuss mutually beneficial solutions, such as "co-hiring or hiring and then scheduling in a way that people could be the immunologist for three vet schools instead of just one."
He has yet to start recruiting but will eventually need to fill 30 to 35 full-time positions.
"It's a common problem; it requires cooperation and collaboration," Murtaugh said. "There's opportunity to be creative and help each other."
The compensation factor
The JAVMA paper authors identify compensation as one of the key factors dissuading veterinary professionals from academia. The rub, said lead author Lairmore, is that often academic institutions aren't able to compete with the salaries offered by private-sector practices.
Though their pay is variable, board-certified specialists in the private sector can earn tens of thousands of dollars more per year than their colleagues in education.
In lieu of better pay, schools may have to do a better job of selling the complete package that an academic career offers, if the results of a survey published in 2024 in the American Journal of Veterinary Research are an indicator. The survey found that for veterinary residents and early-career faculty, career decisions hinged on workplace environment and culture and on work-life balance before salary.
In the experience of Dr. Erik Hofmeister, a veterinary anesthesiologist and academic, the difference between a career inside and outside academia cannot be reduced to a salary comparison. Factors such as schedule flexibility, employee benefits and lifestyle also matter, he said.
"Raising the salaries to private practice is not going to solve the problem, because it's just a different job," Hofmeister said, adding that salaries in academe do need to provide for a life in their respective locations that isn't financially pinched.
Dr. Erik Olstad, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine and Epidemiology at UC Davis' veterinary school, personally has weighed the pros and cons of life as an academic. The pay disparity is real, he said. "It's really tough to get people to [feel like], 'All right, move to this really expensive area and take a salary that's below what you could make out there,' " he said. Despite UC Davis being an esteemed veterinary school, he said he sometimes sees "job positions stay open for a pretty long time."
Not a specialist, the pay differential between his current post and his previous work at an emergency clinic wasn't as stark as it may have been for colleagues who are board-certified, but he still took a cut of some 15 to 20% to become an educator. He thinks the benefits at the university are better, which helped even the scales for him. Ultimately, he made the decision based on quality of life — most notably, the ability to be home more often for his two small children.
"I get to go to my kids' swim lessons, I get to hang out with my family on Christmas," Olstad said. "I never had a Thanksgiving or a Christmas until I got this job."
Seeding the future
Some academics are focusing on the pipeline of current students, interns and residents as the next generation of educators.
According to the 2024 JAVMA paper on the imminent need, several factors discourage new veterinarians from pursuing careers in academe. Principal among those are student debt and low house officer salaries. (House officers are interns and residents.)
The average veterinary resident salary is $46,223, and the average intern salary is $40,000, according to AAVMC data. American Veterinary Medical Association numbers show that veterinary students with student debt who graduated in 2025 owed an average of $212,499.
The paper also highlights the need to better communicate the breadth of challenges and benefits of a lifestyle in education. "If students understand the variety of educational methods and career paths in academia, we propose that they will be better equipped to make an informed decision based upon their interest[s] and passions," the authors write.
Getting early-career veterinarians interested and comfortable in an academic role is the goal of the Veterinary Academic Leaders Program at North Carolina State University, now in its third year, with 40 residents participating. The first cohort will finish the program this year.
Participating residents get together monthly for dinners with speakers on topics such as developing teaching skills, learning to write a grant and what an academic career is like.
Dr. Kathryn Meurs, dean of the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine, gives an example using her specialty of cardiology.
"By the time I'm finished with my residency program and I pass boards, I'm pretty comfortable that I'm a competent, if not pretty good, veterinary cardiologist, because I've had a lot of training in it and passed the national boards certification," she said. "But I'm not sure that I'm going to be a great teacher or that I am a very confident writer about veterinary cardiology."
The goal is not only to prepare future educators but help them form a community.
"The idea is to help them develop additional academic skills during their clinical residency time period," Meurs said, and "also help them build as a cohort, help them feel that, if they think they're interested in this job, here are a few other people that are interested."