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CSU Veterinary Health and Education Complex

Illustration courtesy of Clark & Enersen/Colorado State University

Instruction during the fourth semester of the master's degree in veterinary clinical care program at Colorado State University will take place at the school's new Veterinary Health and Education Complex, slated to be completed in May.

Years in the making, a new master's degree in veterinary clinical care at Colorado State University has opened for applications, with a program start this fall. The first of its kind in the country, the credential aligns with a new midlevel position called a veterinary professional associate, or VPA, that Colorado voters approved in 2024.

As defined by law, VPAs are to work under the supervision of a licensed veterinarian and have a broader scope of practice than veterinary technicians.

Colorado is the only state to create a VPA registration. However, CSU believes graduates of the master's program could work in shelters in other states because many state veterinary practice acts allow veterinarians in shelters, which own the pets in their care, to delegate a greater scope of practice to clinical care team members under their supervision.

Since 2021, when the idea of a midlevel practitioner began gaining traction in the United States, veterinarians have debated — often heatedly — whether the role will ease or exacerbate the challenges it is said to be designed to address, such as veterinarian shortages and the rising cost of care. Amid the controversy, CSU's decision to offer a master's degree has sometimes been a flashpoint.

Two CSU faculty are the driving force behind the new degree. Dr. Shari Lanning, an expert in online learning and designing curriculum and instruction to meet the diverse needs of all students with an interest in access-to-veterinary-care issues, is the director of the master's program. Dr. Wayne Jensen, a professor in the clinical sciences department, first proposed the degree almost 10 years ago. His thought was that a midlevel practitioner role could help shelters around the country and expand career opportunities for veterinary technicians.

Lanning and Jensen met with the VIN News Service on a video call this month to talk about where the program is now and why it's needed.

The conversation came amid related developments. A bill that would create the country's second VPA role is advancing through the Florida Legislature. Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee is reviewing applications for a new master's in veterinary clinical care, a program conceived separately from Colorado's but since revamped to ensure graduates meet Colorado's VPA criteria. And regulators in Colorado are beginning to hammer out scope-of-practice rules for the new midlevel position. 

The interview is edited for length and clarity and incorporates responses to follow-up questions.

What is the relationship between this program and CSU's veterinary school?

Dr. Shari Lanning: From the very beginning, we used the current DVM curriculum at CSU to help formulate the program itself, concentrating on just cats and dogs and on the competencies of the VPA, using a lot of the same structure of the DVM program and also the course objectives and content.

Will there be shared resources or faculty?

Lanning: As it stands now, the master's program is going to run on its own budget and with its own faculty and its own resources. There are areas where we can collaborate with the DVM program. CSU is reworking their veterinary school curriculum, and they're launching in the fall. Their work in developing the details of that new curriculum hasn't extended to their third year just yet, which is where we would have a lot of overlap with our fourth semester. So those conversations haven't been solidified.

Where does the application process stand?

Lanning: Application is open for fall '26. The soft close date is April 1. We do have a number of applicants who have received a preliminary acceptance based on them being able to finish one or two prerequisites with a grade of B or higher.

Who's applying? What are their backgrounds?

Lanning: You name it. Most of our prospective students are already in the veterinary field, whether they are certified or registered technicians or veterinary assistants.

Letters

From Dr. Michael Q. Bailey, Mar. 5, 2026

We also have some students who are currently working in more of a mixed animal field and would really like to see a large animal master's program launched. That's down the line, but they are interested in working in small animal until that happens.

We have students in the human field, a couple of physician assistants who know exactly how PAs work within the human realm and think that this is a great way for them to be able to transition into the veterinary profession.

Where are you seeing the most enthusiasm for the program?

Lanning: Local shelters, clinics and private hospitals. We have a couple of individuals who have contacted us — within Colorado, within private practice — who said, "Here is the way that I structure my clinic, and I can see exactly where this individual would fit into my practice and help me be more efficient and help me to address spectrum of care in my practice."

Shari_Lanning_CSU

Colorado State University photo

A 2006 graduate of Colorado State University's veterinary school, Dr. Shari Lanning is the director of the university's master's in veterinary clinical care program.

Of course, with shelter medicine, we know that it is very difficult for certain shelters to find veterinarians. I've heard from a number of shelters that say, "I have had an open position for over a year. We are offering the same salary as private practice. It used to be that we had this misunderstanding that we couldn't pay as well as private practice, and that's just not the reality of it. But we still can't find veterinarians to fill these positions."

This is an opportunity for a VPA to be able to offer veterinary care under the supervision of a veterinarian to shelter animals and be able to help the bottleneck of those spays and neuters that need to be done prior to those animals being adopted out.

(Editor's note: The Colorado Board of Veterinary Medicine has not yet defined the scope of practice for VPAs, including whether they will be allowed to perform spays and castrations.)

Where are you seeing resistance to the program?

Lanning: The main resistance, I think everyone knows, is from the American Veterinary Medical Association and their state constituents.

Have you talked to the AVMA about their concerns?

Lanning: I have only met with a representative of AVMA once, and that was because I reached out to them because they were going to be on campus. I thought it was a good idea to meet and actually have a discussion. That only happened, I believe it was in May of last year, so fairly recent, and it was not much of a conversation.

You've talked about "misinformation" fueling some of the opposition. What are some examples?

Lanning: Some of the misguidance has been from a misunderstanding of how the different levels of courses work. In undergraduate, we have 100-, 200-, 300-, 400-level courses. That's more of the technician level. Then, we have the DVM level, which is usually at the 700 level and above. The higher you go up in those levels, the higher the difficulty and the higher the competencies and objectives associated with those courses are. The master's program is right in the middle: It's 500- and 600-level courses.

We've seen some misinformation about the inadequate training that could potentially be taking place within the program. That's why I highlight the 416 laboratory hours that take place in the fourth semester and the 540 hours of clinical internship that take place in the fifth semester.

When we look at a DVM program, what we see is that those students are learning all species, not just dogs and cats. Whereas with the VPA, we are focused solely on dogs and cats. With the DVM program, they need to know the gamut of all the different diseases and all the different problems that happen with all of those species. We've been able to really focus on uncomplicated, routine diseases that we tend to see in small animal veterinary medicine.

What's the feedback from CSU veterinary students on the master's program?

Lanning: There was a pretty heavy opposition from AVMA last year that did actually target some of the veterinary students. With that misinformation, students were pretty riled up. Wayne and I held a number of meetings with students, and one of the things that I heard time and time again was that these VPAs would basically take veterinary jobs. Also, that they would be treating, kind of unbeknownst to these new veterinarians, very complicated diseases.

One student said, "Here I'm trying to learn how to do basic surgical care, and they're going to be doing a splenectomy." I said, "Whoa, wait a minute, at no point is this individual trained to do a splenectomy. We are talking about uncomplicated, routine care of animals. Now, if you would like to have help within that surgical room like you would from a technician, that is different."

I think that a lot of students forget that this relationship that we are proposing with the VPA and the DVM is no different than what we see with CVTs [certified veterinary technicians] and DVMs. CVTs work under the license of a veterinarian. A VPA works under the license of a veterinarian. If you ultimately do not feel that that VPA is qualified to do what they are trained to do, you don't hire them, or you don't allow them to do that.

How are veterinary technicians responding?

Lanning: It's been kind of a mixed bag, as well. I will tell you the last meeting that I had with first-year veterinary students — and keep in mind, a lot of DVM students are technicians or former technicians — was very open. It was very honest, and it cleared up a lot of this misinformation.

The very last comment that I had from the meeting was, "Are we going to be able to work with these students prior to us graduating, so that we know how we're going to be working with them out in the field?" I said, "That is absolutely a great question."

I would say specifically with technicians, it's the same sort of conversation. We have talked with veterinary technicians and the local CVT group. It was a lot of clarification of why we couldn't eliminate the bachelor's requirement. That was one misconception — that we chose to require a bachelor's before going into this. But that is a national graduate school standard.

Wayne_Jensen

Colorado State University photo

A professor in the clinical sciences department at Colorado State University veterinary school, Dr. Wayne Jensen has advocated for nearly a decade to create a midlevel position on veterinary care teams.

Requiring a bachelor's degree seems to be an argument for the strength of the program. Why were you receptive to not requiring it?

Dr. Wayne Jensen: Part of the reason is, we believe this program could be a career path for technicians, so we wanted to make it open to as many technicians as possible. I don't know the exact number, but I would estimate that somewhere between 80% to 90% of technicians only have an associate's degree, so they're not eligible.

Originally, we thought that if we could find a way around that, if they had an associate's degree and a certain number of years of experience and could take and pass the prerequisites for the course, that would be sufficient. But as Shari outlined, it's just not a possibility.

The current curriculum focuses on cats and dogs, and you are beginning to develop one for large animals. Could the master's degrees be helpful in terms of veterinarian shortages in rural areas?

Lanning: One of the issues that we can see when it comes to rural communities is, if an individual's career option is DVM, that individual will leave their community for four years. Those students — and we know this historically from DVM programs that have reached out to rural communities and two-and-two programs — once they graduate, they don't tend to go back to the rural community.

(Lanning said she doesn't know of any published research measuring the effectiveness of veterinary school programs designed to draw graduates to rural communities.)

The beauty of this program, and why we were so intentional about that pre-clinical portion being online, is that those individuals can stay within their community. They only need to leave technically for that fourth semester. If they have a clinical practice or shelter within their rural community that meets our expectations for what that clinical training will be, they can go back to their community and eventually work there. So, they're only gone one semester. Potentially by keeping those connections, they are more likely to stay within that rural community.

In a case like that, would a CSU representative visit this clinic and evaluate it for suitability?

Lanning: Yes. We already have the documents in place for the requirements for the supervising veterinarian: what it takes to supervise that student, the check-in points throughout that fifth semester, the equipment that you need in order to have a clinic that would fulfill this training, and what is entailed within that clinical internship.

Any idea what salaries will be for VPAs, potentially?

Lanning: When we were creating this proposal, that's obviously a question that CSU asks … salary expectation is definitely something that they look at because they want this to be a profitable career for those individuals. Now, are there current salary numbers that we can look at? Absolutely not. So that's where we kind of ran into a little bit of issues. We can project what we think it will be based on their skill set and based on their training and how they might be able to fit into a shelter or a clinical setting, but we can't say for sure.

(The December 2024 comprehensive proposal for the master's program projected the anticipated salary range for the VPA to be 60% to 75% of the supervising veterinarian's salary.)

Jensen: Dr. Jim Lloyd, former dean at Florida and an economist, did a study where he modeled what would be the financial impact of hiring a VPA into a [3.5-veterinarian] small animal practice. He set aside, "OK, this is what they would do. They would do rechecks. They would do wellness visits." What he didn't have in there was that they would do any surgery at all. I would say his model is relatively conservative.

He set the salary at $100,000. Then he asked, "What would the impact of hiring a VPA be to the net profit in this model?" The net profit to that veterinary hospital was more than $177,000.

You mentioned in the past that CSU may want to hire some of the graduates to work in its teaching hospital. What would you hope to accomplish with that plan?

Lanning: I could see them being hired back into the program and helping to teach future graduates. Whether they will be employed at the veterinary health system at CSU just depends on the financial needs of the hospital. How they may integrate into that is definitely open for discussion.

The VPA students will not train within the specialty hospital. That is mostly because, based on their competencies, having training under specialists is not a necessity. These individuals will be working with DVMs and addressing spectrum-of-care issues and shortages within general practice. It doesn't make sense to have them train under specialists.

Jensen: I would just say that it's too early to tell. But in the long run, we want to look at modeling team-based veterinary health care, and so it would make sense … if we'd actually be able to demonstrate it in the veterinary teaching hospital.

Anything we haven't covered that you want to raise?

Jensen: There was a report from Gallup that was just released. It was funded by PetSmart Charities. The conclusion was that in the U.S., there are 50 million pets that are underserved as far as veterinary care goes.

We have this huge access-to-care issue. Part of that issue is physical. There are not enough people to deliver veterinary services. But part of it is also financial. Our prices are such that people can no longer afford our veterinary services. It's upon us as the veterinary profession to find more economical ways in the delivery of veterinary services. Is the VPA the total answer to that? No. But could it be a partial answer? Absolutely. We'll be able to train them more quickly and more affordably, and that, theoretically, can transfer to more affordable veterinary care.

March 16 update: A bill to create a registered VPA in Florida did not pass the state Senate before the legislative session ended.