Veterinary Medicine
Straight Talk. The stuff “they” don’t tell you about.
No Rose Colored Glasses. Only Transparent Ones.
Should I go to veterinary school?
No. Unless you’re having your tuition/expenses paid for you by someone else OR you are willing to deal with the things described in other answers to questions below.
In short, if being a veterinarian is your dream job then nothing can or should stop you. Do it. Become one. But be aware of the realities of it.
It’s not right to bury your head in the sand without knowing what’s in it beforehand. You’ll be fighting an uphill battle for the rest of your life but if you want to become a veterinarian really badly then you should consider your struggle justified, right?
If you’re unsure of being a veterinarian then read the other answers to weigh your options with the reality of the industry (none of those rosy and misguided Yahoo articles here).
Is it really more difficult to get into veterinary school than medical school?
No. I’ve heard that lie from everyone, including human medical doctors. Quantitatively it IS more difficult to get into veterinary school on average since the percentage of accepted applicants is about 5-10% smaller than medical schools, given the available seats. BUT on average, qualitatively the applicant pool for veterinary seats is FAR less competitive than for medical school. Therefore, on AVERAGE, the competition for a seat in veterinary school is not of the same caliber as the competition for a seat in medical school.
Is veterinary school harder that medical school?
Yes and no. I’ve conversed specifically with veterinarians, MDs, and PhDs who have all taught at least in one veterinary and one medical program. And yes, DVMs do teach at medical schools and MDs do teach at veterinary schools for different purposes.
The consensus was as follows:
Veterinary students have it harder in some sense because they have to keep species differences and intra-species differences in mind. If you’re confused about the latter: for example, there are drugs that will kill one breed of dog and not another even though it’s the same species. Therefore, you need to keep those things in mind and human physicians have it far easier since they do not have to worry about “breed” differences or medical differences between species. We (veterinarians) are also like pediatricians in that we cannot talk to our patients, which makes it that much more difficult to diagnose and treat problems.
On the flip-side, medical students have to understand things in far more depth since they are only focused in on one species whereas, comparatively speaking, veterinary students gloss over things a lot. It only makes sense. Not including residency, it’s 4 years of medical school for vets and physicians. You can’t realistically study several species in as much depth as one species in that amount of time. And YES, there is plenty of information to know even for canines to spend four years on, in depth, on par with human medical schools. Any veterinarian will tell you there’s a ton of information out there on dogs, cats, etc, they never learned in veterinary school because it’s not possible to learn about more than one major species, with true depth, breadth, and understanding in four years flat.
Finally, there’s one other distinction these professors and practitioners made between veterinary and medical students: medical students take their studies more seriously than veterinary students. They are apparently more prepared than veterinary students not only for their studies but for labs, tests, and so forth.
How much does veterinary school cost?
On average (including in/out of state tuition averages), including living expenses and tuition, you’ll spend $160,000 over four years for the school. This figure doesn’t including accruing compound interest payments. So, the real number will be higher.
The loans aren’t a big deal with the income based and pay as your earn repayment plans, right?
Mmm…sort of. In the short term, it’s misleading. Here’s why. These plans offer forgiveness of the remaining loan balance after you fulfill certain criteria and pay your monthly loan amount for two decades. While these plans reduce the amount you pay per month substantially, especially if you don’t make a lot, there’s a huge catch. At the end of 20 years, the remaining loan balance is “forgiven”. But, it doesn’t go away. This means if you have $100,000 worth of remaining loans after 20 years of repayment, the IRS will treat the $100,000 as additional income and you’ll have to pay a huge tax bill in one lump sump the year you get those loans forgiven.
What does this mean for you in reality? Well, in addition to paying a monthly repayment amount to the government for 20 years straight you’ll have to put away hundreds of dollars into a saving’s account every month for 20 years so you have money to pay off your tax bill in 20 years. So, the reality is that while you will pay the government less every month for 20 years you’ll still have to “pay” yourself in preparation for the tax bill, making your actual monthly repayment much more than it seems superficially.
What’s the REAL average starting salary for a veterinarian?
If you DO NOT include the poorly paid interns/residents (who will bring this number down quite a bit), then it’s about $67,500/year. This is only an average. The more rural you are and the more large animal work you do as a general practitioner, the less you’ll make. The starting salary will be closer to about $50,000/year in those latter scenarios.
If you are working in an expensive and very populated city and you’re working with only small animals (dogs/cats), then you’re looking closer to a $82,500/year starting salary. However, consider that in cases of the latter, living expenses and taxes go up quite a bit compared to rural vets and therefore the salary doesn’t look so great afterward you deduct those costs.
How is that possible!? I went to the vet and they charged $300 for a 20 minute visit! That’s, like, more than my doctor makes!
Yes. And of those $300 the VAST majority went to paying: the receptionist, technician, assistant, building loan, land taxes, paying off millions of dollars’ worth of medical equipment, laboratory fees, maintenance, utilities, drug fees, licenses, obligatory (rightfully so) continuing education, and so on.
What about benefits, like 401k/vacation/holidays/insurance?
A very important and an often missed question! Benefits, in the non-corporate veterinary world (e.g. not Banfield/BluePearl) are virtually non-existent since most private clinics are scraping a living. Medical/dental/vision insurance is either COMPLETELY non-existent or mediocre at best. This means you may have to take out money out of your paycheck (several hundred a month) to pay for your own health/vision/medical insurance.
401K (retirement) with or without your employer matching your retirement contribution? Good luck. You’ll almost certainly need to save and put aside money for retirement more so on your own. This means that your expendable monthly income will be much lower if you are smart enough about saving money for your retirement right away.
Vacation? Depends, 10 days is typical.
Weekends? You’re lucky if you work at a place where you get 2 consecutive days off a week as a standard amount (unless it’s an ER clinic). I’m not even kidding you. 2 days off in a row every week is something longed for by many veterinarians.
On call? Yes. Lots of places make you be on call during your days off or when you’re sleeping. So, you’re not really off. Sometimes you’ll get no pay for being on call and other times it will be a nominal amount (e.g. something like $20-$100/night).
What are the work hours like?
50-55 hours per week. So, your $80,000/year salary is even more-so less valuable on an hourly basis than your white collar friends making the same amount and working only 40 hours per week with full medical and retirement benefits with no on-call hours to worry about.
Can you put the financial burden of going to vet school into a real world perspective for me?
Sure. If your friend goes to get a bachelor’s of finance degree and gets a $50,000/year job out of undergraduate school without any debts, it will take you close to TEN YEARS to break even financially with them assuming they don’t get a single raise in that time. You’ll be 36 by then if you went to vet school at 22. 36 years old.
By then, they will be making as much or more than you if they have any brains to them and moved up the corporate ladder. And they won’t have the same tuition debts as you, they’ll have a nice retirement account, good benefits, and won’t have to save money for a huge tax on income forgiveness.
As a very rough estimate, you should subtract $15,000-$25,000/year from your salary as a veterinarian to account for having to save more for retirement on your own, repay monthly tuition loans, save money on a monthly basis for your tax bill once your loans are “forgiven”, and (potentially) having to pay for your own medical insurance.
So, if you are making $75,000/year as a veterinarian then it’s like making $50,000/year in a white collar job at a normal corporation. You think you can make that much with just a bachelor’s degree? I think so too. Oh, and your time will be worth more “per-hour” since as a white collar corporate finance professional you’ll be working fewer hours per week than the average veterinarian, not to mention the opportunity costs involved with having to work more hours per week.
Oh, wait, one last somber but realistic note. If you become a relief veterinarian, you are considered self-employed. Thanks to Uncle Sam, you’ll have to pay an additional 15% tax on your income every year compared to a veterinarian employed by a clinic. So you can subtract several more thousand from your salary to come to a “real-world” salary estimate of what you are actually making compared to someone who didn’t go to veterinary school and didn’t get saddled with the mess a lot of veterinarians are in right now.
Is there a shortage of veterinarians?
Absolutely not. There are way too many small animal practitioners around, many of whom aren’t making a good living. The “shortage” exists in the: rural animal health, public health, and research sectors. BUT, BUT, BUT….it exists NOT because there aren’t enough veterinarians willing to do the work or even those that qualified to do so, there’s plenty waiting to get those job. The “shortage” exists because the government is not willing to fund those sectors well enough to create the jobs that are desperately in short order for public health/zoonosis concerns. Therefore the shortage is sort of a fake one. Plenty of vets are there to fill very few seats where there should be more seats to do the job well.
So, if your school advertises a shortage for MPH or PhD people who also have a DVM, they are flat out lying. The shortage is there but there are no jobs around to help fill the shortage. Does this make sense to you? Furthermore, when you’ll graduate with you DVM/PhD or DVM/MPH you’ll be competing against a PLETHORA of far more experienced vets for those very few jobs available who were suckered in with those same promises years ago.
Right now, more veterinary schools are being approved left and right than ever before and class sizes are increasing for each school. More schools, higher class sizes, more veterinarians, not enough demand to proportionately compensate. It’s all a money making machine, churning out veterinarians as they did dentists in the 1980’s, prior to their industry’s collapse due to workforce oversupply as a result of “shortage” lies and universities looking to make a profit.
What if I open my own clinic, won’t I make more then?
Maybe. About 25% of large city small animal veterinary clinics are near bankruptcy. 25% are scraping a living. 25% are making a middle class income. 25% are doing very well (on par with human medical practitioners). The numbers are far grimmer for rural and large animal practitioners.
Most of the individuals I know who have opened up their own clinic within the last 20 years took TEN YEARS before they broke even and managed to live above near poverty level. It’s only getting harder now with rising medical equipment and building costs, let alone taxes.
By the way, the people who paid off their clinic loans in ten years graduated with almost no tuition debt 20 years ago. Nowadays you’ll probably work 20-30 years paying of tuition and clinic loans before you break even.
What if I become a specialist, won’t I make lots more then?
Maybe and even if you will, it may not be worth it. Here’s why.
On average, to become a specialist, you need to do a year of a general internship and 3-4 years of residency AFTER completing veterinary school. For VERY competitive residencies (ophthalmology, surgery, etc), it’s not uncommon for people to do a second specialty internship before getting a residency position. Conservatively that will boil down to at least 4 years of post-veterinary school, low income earning potential. Read: an average of $30,000/year for 60-100 hour work-weeks over the course of 4 years. Yes, interns/residents do work that much for that little. You can kiss sleep good-bye.
How much will you earn thereafter, after you become a specialist? Again, it depends. Some specialists (rural and large animal especially) will literally only make about $80,000/year starting salary wise.
Big city, big hospital starting salaries can be about $125-$150,000/year (very hard to get those good positions). Some specialists cannot find work because there’s no demand for them. They work as glorified general practitioners instead and do not get a substantial raise for their expertise since the public isn’t willing to spend on them.
The problem right now is compared to 15-20 years ago, A LOT of people are trying to compensate for massive tuition increases and stagnating salaries by going the residency route. There has not been a proportionate increase in public demand for these services and therefore, due to current, and even more so future oversupply of specialists, the salaries are only going to drop even more for specialists.
I recently saw an advertisement for a board certified radiologist willing to pay no more than $100,000/year. It’s ridiculous. $100k a year seems like a lot but not for their amount of sacrifice and training. Unfortunately no one gives a damn about your sacrifices, training, and financial strain. It’s all about supply and demand. The specialty field is becoming as overcrowded as the GP field and will become more so with time.
This brings me to my next point. If you become a specialist, you must consider the massive financial (not to mention personal) opportunity costs involved in doing so. I calculated, that on average, it will take you 7.5 YEARS AFTER finishing your specialty to make up for the lost wages of having to do the residency/internship compared to a GP who went to work right away and made a more normal living than you during that time.
That figure doesn’t include making up for having to defer loans and accruing compound interest payments. If you went to vet school aged 22, then you will be in your late 30s by the time you financially surpass your non-specialist friends who went to work straight out of veterinary school. This 7.5 year figure also assumed the non-specialists you’re comparing yourself to NEVER got a raise over a period of 10 years. So, it’s a very conservative estimate. You’re likely to be 40+ years old before you break even financially for pursuing a competitive (read: high paying) specialty.
So, is it worth it? Only if you’re not in it for the money and to make a decent living which you quite frankly deserve.
What kind of medicine will I be practicing?
You’ll be practicing the art of persuasion more than medicine. In terms of medicine, you’ll be doing mainly simple things. Veterinary medicine is business first, medicine second. We have to first treat a client’s wallet and psyche prior to properly treating the patient. While human physicians have the ability to actually treat the patient more so than the wallet, in veterinary medicine it’s the reverse. Often times you’ll know medically what to do and how to do it but people won’t be willing to pay you for it. So, your best friends will become: antibiotics, steroids, and fluids since they’re cheap.
Furthermore, you will almost certainly not be playing with cutting edge medical or surgical technology. It’s simple why. Economics really. While human physicians have access to the latest and greatest medical innovations we wouldn’t even be able to come close to affording it for our animal patients.
Furthermore, animal studies and FDA approved devices and medicines are very rare for specifically for animals. Lots of animal data as a byproduct of testing drugs/technologies for humans exists but that’s not enough for us to make much sense of for practical medical purposes and many times we just hope that it does something beneficial since we have no better alternative, frankly.
Most things are used off-label and on a “best guess” basis when it comes to cutting edge stuff for animals. Again, no one (drug companies/medical device companies/governments/pet owners) is willing to pay for appropriately testing these things for animals, therefore you shouldn’t be surprised why our hands are often tied whether we have access to something or not when it comes to proper medical care.
Furthermore, only 10% of your customers will give you a carte blanche to do medically and surgically everything you can and have access to, 10% will have no money at all, and the rest you’re going to have to milk first prior to doing at least part of what’s medically right. Most owners don’t care if you know what to do, they only care if you know how to do it as cost effectively as possible. Are you willing to deal with the intellectual torture of not being able to do the best thing for your patients only because your client is willing to pay for it year after year? Many vets can’t deal with it.
You seem to be really pessimistic about this field. What’s your agenda?
I’m not pessimistic, just realistic based on experience and data. If you didn’t like hearing the “other side” of veterinary medicine, then that is your choice. However, don’t be fooled by the rosy outlooks you may have heard of. They are there but your chances are about only 1 in 4 of actually living like that.
I also have no agenda but to make sure all the great things you have heard about veterinary medicine are balanced out by the realities most veterinarians face. You have the right to know about them and most veterinary schools will NOT tell you about them since it is in their interest to take your tuition money for obvious reasons. It’s simple economics.
The Realistic Vet 