Lyon College & ASU Work to Solve Veterinarian Shortage

Glen Hoffsis, founding dean at Arkansas State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said the school is on track to open in the fall of 2026. (Provided)

Arkansas has no veterinary schools now, and the two in planning stages can’t come soon enough, educators say.

“There is a national shortage of veterinarians, described by many as crisis proportions,” according to Dr. Eleanor Green, founding dean of the Lyon College School of Veterinary Medicine, targeted to open somewhere in Little Rock by fall 2025. “This shortage is acute and chronic.”

Arkansas has the lowest number of employed veterinarians in the nation, with an average of 14 veterinarians per 100,000 people, she said. However, the number of veterinarians in Arkansas has risen in recent years. The state has 1,095 active veterinarians, according to the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, and of those, 803 have Arkansas addresses. In 2019, there were 952 active veterinarians in Arkansas, with 713 listing Arkansas addresses.

Lyon College, a private liberal arts school in Batesville, hopes to open its veterinary school before Arkansas State University, which has its own plans underway, can start training veterinarians in Jonesboro.

But as of Tuesday afternoon, the school had not secured a site for its campus.

A deal to put the school on the Heifer International headquarters campus in Little Rock fell through in November, and no new location has been announced. Lyon had also planned to put a new dental school on the Heifer campus, just south of the Clinton Presidential Library.

“We continue to focus on downtown Little Rock as the priority location, and are grateful for our many partners in the Little Rock community who are working with us to achieve this goal,” a Lyon spokeswoman told Arkansas Business via email.

Meanwhile, the Arkansas State University veterinary school is on track to open in fall 2026, officials said.

Dr. Lindy O’Neal, president of the Arkansas Veterinary Medical Association, said Arkansas and the nation face a shortage of veterinarians who treat large animals, particularly cattle and horses.

She said those positions are difficult to fill because treating large animals is harder on a veterinarian’s body than treating companion animals, like dogs and cats. Treating large animals also means covering a large geographic area, “so it takes more time per appointment,” O’Neal said. And the pay isn’t lucrative in relation to the debt burden many new graduates carry, she said. The American Veterinary Medical Association reported that in 2022 the average student debt for veterinary school graduates was $147,258.

A national study suggests no great shortage of veterinarians who treat companion animals, O’Neal said. Some pet owners will pay great sums to preserve their dog or cat’s health, but veterinarians are still adjusting how they practice.

“What we’re seeing on the companion animal side is that people are changing the way they work,” O’Neal said. A veterinarian in a small-animal clinic might have flexible hours rather than working from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. “So while there may be plenty of veterinarians, the actual time in the clinic has changed a little bit.”

In addition, veterinarians are spending more time with the pets. “Historically, an exam might be 10 to 15 minutes long, and now we’ve started to space them out to 20 to 30 minutes,” she said.

Vet Shortage

Millennials are using pets as starter families, if not permanent families, Lyon’s Green said. “And so these animals are like children too. And [pet owners] expect the highest level of care for beloved members of their family,” Green said.

She said at least 66% of households own a pet, and nearly 70% of households will own a pet during the year. That increase in pet ownership is putting a strain on the number of vets.

The lack of veterinarian schools also contributes to the shortage of vets.

There are 32 schools or colleges of veterinary medicine in the United States that are accredited or have accreditation pending, according to the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges.

Only one new veterinary school opened in the U.S. between 1978 and 2014, Lyon College said.

Green said at least 2,000 qualified applicants don’t get admitted to veterinary school each year because there aren’t enough schools.

“We just haven’t expanded our capacity to train veterinarians as fast as demand has increased,” said Dr. Jim Lloyd, senior consultant and dean emeritus at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida.

Lloyd has been advising Arkansas State University on its veterinary school and said he will be working with the school for the next year or two.

But when the schools are open and producing veterinarians, “it’s going to improve the health of the animal populations in the state,” he said.

“That has implications for public health as well and the quality of the foods that we eat, because many of those animals are our food producing animals as you know.”

Green agreed. “Animal agriculture is of huge importance in Arkansas,” she said. “You can’t make money on sick animals, and so it’s important to the farmers to keep their animals healthy. And veterinarians have a role there.”

A-State’s Vet School

A-State’s College of Veterinary Medicine will have a class size of 120 students, said Dr. Glen Hoffsis, founding dean of the college.

The initial up-front equipment and facility cost was estimated at $15 million, an ASU spokesman said via email. “With construction costs continuing to increase, we expect it to be slightly higher now.”

The price will be paid for by a combination of tuition from the College of Veterinary Medicine, fundraising, university reserves and potential bonding initiatives.

The school is working to get through the accreditation process. “We’re very advanced in our planning,” Hoffsis said.

A 30,000-SF building will be built for the school. “And then we’ll be using the existing buildings and the animal facilities at the farm,” he said. “There’s quite a bit of space available on Arkansas State’s campus.”

Lyon’s Vet School

Lyon had its first Council on Education visit in November “and the preliminary report was very good,” Green said. The COE is the accrediting agency for colleges and schools of veterinary medicine in the United States.

She said the accreditation process is “moving along at this point.”

But a key to having the accreditation is having a physical location. “That’s critical in the process,” she said. “You can’t have a vet school without a location. And quite frankly, we’ve got some construction to do to get the buildings where we can accommodate students. … We’re going to hustle.”

Lyon College will have a three-year program, instead of the traditional four years, by having students attend classes year-round instead of being off for the summer, Green said.

The 36-month program is designed to decrease students’ debt while increasing their ability to earn a wage a year sooner. “We think students want to be veterinarians more than they want to be veterinary students,” Green said.

Lyon plans to graduate about 120 students a year.

After about two years in the classrooms, the students from both schools will be clinical trainees in veterinarian offices.

“Maybe by 2030, we’re going to see some of these students graduating,” O’Neal, of the Arkansas Veterinary Medical Association, said. “But what we have to remember is that we have to attract these students to our practices, or else they’re not going to stay in Arkansas.”

Students who want to practice on large animals will need to accompany those vets on calls. “It can be very overwhelming to graduate on day one and think, ‘Well, how do I go do a farm call?’”

That experience can be overwhelming, she said. “And if it’s overwhelming, they’re going to burn out quickly,” O’Neal said. “And if they burn out quickly, they’re not going to stay.”