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Arkansas State University photo

Under construction, the 56,000-square-foot College of Veterinary Medicine building at Arkansas State University's Jonesboro campus is slated to be completed before the first students arrive in August.

Arkansas State University has begun accepting applications for its first veterinary school class less than two weeks before the April 15 deadline by which most prospective veterinary students in the United States must commit to a program.

Under Arkansas's compressed schedule, the program dean, Dr. Heidi Banse, said that applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, with an initial round of decisions made by April 15 and decisions completed by May 4. 

The school announced on Friday that it was ready to take applications after having received a letter of reasonable assurance from the American Veterinary Medical Association Council on Education, the only U.S.-based veterinary program accreditor. The letter indicates confidence that the program can achieve full accreditation when its inaugural class graduates.

"Our growing College of Veterinary Medicine team has worked diligently towards this milestone over the last two years," Banse told the VIN News Service by email. "We are so grateful to our community partners across the state that have helped make this possible."

Arkansas State's first-year application crunch is not unprecedented. Several new programs in recent years have similarly received letters of reasonable assurance late in the regular veterinary school application cycle. Nearly all established veterinary schools in the country use a centralized portal called the Veterinary Medical College Application Service (VMCAS), which is open from January to September of the year preceding the start of classes. Letters of acceptance typically go out in the following January and February, and students have two months or longer to decide whether to accept.

Among new programs that independently reviewed applications for inaugural classes are the two others that will seat first classes later this year, at Clemson University in South Carolina and Lincoln Memorial University in Florida.

A first for Arkansas

The veterinary school at Arkansas State, a public research institution, will be the 39th in the U.S. and its territories. It is the state's first veterinary school.

The program is intended to address an undersupply of veterinarians in the state, Banse said, noting that 10 counties in the state have no veterinarians at all, and 18 are recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as having a shortage of food animal veterinarians.

"It is important we create a veterinary pipeline here in Arkansas to help fill our needs," Banse said.

A second program in the state is in development at Lyon College, a private institution. It will be located outside Little Rock, about 100 miles southwest of Arkansas State. The accreditor will make a comprehensive site visit to Lyon in August, a step that typically comes before the accreditor decides whether to issue a letter of reasonable assurance.

Arkansas State aims to seat 120 students in its first class, with 50% of seats reserved for residents, according to Banse. The university estimates the cost of attendance for residents will be $59,174 during each of the first three years and $64,174 for the fourth year. For nonresidents, the costs are estimated at $79,174 and $84,174, respectively.

The new program spelled the end of a longstanding partnership between Arkansas and the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine through which nine seats per class had been reserved for state residents to attend LSU at the same tuition as Louisiana residents.

Even before Arkansas State had the accreditor's OK to accept students, LSU said in a statement on its website that the program would not be in place for students entering this year.

In Arkansas's four-year degree program, three years will be spent primarily on campus in what Arkansas State describes as "a competency-based curriculum," followed by one year of clinical training in veterinary practices mostly in Arkansas, western Tennessee and southern Missouri.

Training students in off-campus practices rather than at an on-campus teaching hospital is usually described as a distributed model. However, Banse said Arkansas State calls it a "community-centered" model.

"We're here to train students from our small communities, which Arkansas is a state of small communities, to go back to those communities," Banse said.

A 56,000-square-foot College of Veterinary Medicine building is under construction on Arkansas State's Jonesboro campus. Banse said the building will be completed in time for the August start.

Utah State's 'challenge'

Utah State has some idea of the time squeeze that Arkansas State faces. The university, located in Logan, Utah, received its letter of reasonable assurance in March of last year, and it had an intended start date less than five months later.

The day the letter arrived, the college emailed the 350 people on its list of prospective applicants, opened an online portal and soon after, began receiving applications.

"I won't sugarcoat it — last year's cycle was a challenge," Cathleen Kovarik, Utah State's director of veterinary admissions, told VIN News by email last week.

The school planned to fill 40 seats: 25 for Utah residents, 15 for nonresidents. Kovarik said it received more than 300 applications, which she considers to be a large volume for the short timeline. Of those, about 130 were from Utah residents.

"Because this was a rolling cycle, we were unable to review all applications before our seats were filled," Kovarik said. "Our acceptance rate was phenomenal; only four offers were declined."

She said the hardest part was having to do multiple tasks at once with many individual applications. "The program was receiving and processing applications, assigning applications to reviewers, and determining applicants that received offers all at the same time," she said.

Once applicants received an offer, they had seven days to accept it.

This cycle, Utah State participated in VMCAS and had many more applications.

"With VMCAS, we face large, one-time hurdles instead of having so many moving parts," Kovarik said. "We can treat applicants as a group instead of tackling one application at a time."

Contrasting the first and second years, Kovarik said, "I initially liked the fact that we could personalize our application portal to fit what we wanted to evaluate in our applicants, but quickly (after calculating over 50 GPAs a week) realized that VMCAS is a powerful tool."

Arkansas's school is part of a recent wave of new programs. Since 2020, nine veterinary schools have or are about to open, including at Arkansas State, Clemson, Lincoln Memorial (Florida), Long Island University in New York, Rowan University in New Jersey, Texas Tech University, Universidad Ana G. Méndez in Puerto Rico, University of Arizona and Utah State.

Including Lyon College in Arkansas, seven institutions are in various stages of creating veterinary programs. They are: Midwestern University in Illinois, Murray State University in Kentucky, Rocky Vista University in Montana, Roseman University of Health Sciences in Nevada, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and the University of Nevada, Reno.