As I shared in a previous blog post, the AVMA Board of Directors is the only AVMA Board position that you as an AVMA member directly elect. In many member associations, members directly elect their entire leadership, including the officers of the association. One concern that has surfaced when AVMA governance is discussed is how will the average member know who is a good leader and who is not? A worry expressed by others was the ability to “buy” influence and votes, such as a major veterinary corporation dictating that all of its AVMA member veterinarians vote for a specific candidate. Another was the potential for a major veterinary publication to endorse a candidate and unfairly publicize that candidate. The concern I would like to throw out is that of money.

How much should it cost to run for an AVMA Board position?
Well, there is no entry fee, but there is a cost to the time committed for reaching out through social media and to district state VMAs, sometimes even taking time off work to travel long distances to do so. The state VMAs in District I have been incredibly supportive of both candidates in my Board race. Each has allowed the candidates to speak to their executive boards, provided information in their member newsletters, and Vermont even  allowed both candidates to address the VVMA members at their winter business meeting last weekend. The outreach necessary for members to know who you are as a candidate can even require postal mail. Yes, a flyer or letter in the mail is a traditional route of communication from candidates or their nominating organizations, to reach members.  

Now here is where the cost can really add up. I looked into this option and calculated the cost of mailing a simple 5x7 postcard to the approximately 8900 veterinarians in District 1 (New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont) and postage alone would cost in excess of $3,000. Yes, three thousand dollars. While I am committed to earning your vote for this position, I felt that $3,000+ was better spent invested in my family, my practice, and my efforts to reach AVMA District I members on a more personal, less junk mail kind of level. So in the interest of not throwing my hard-earned savings account into the wind and creating an environmental mess of printed cards, I decided to attach what my flyer would have looked like had it been sent to your postal mailbox. 

I realize that for some, a quick snapshot of my qualifications may be the best information, so I have created a virtual mailer, posted here. It will also be available on my Facebook, twitter and Linkedin pages. Please help me share this perspective and my qualifications and get the word out in an environmentally friendly manner by sharing far and wide!

Show me the money
For those of us in the veterinary community, there is something we all recognize and cringe when we think about…how much it costs to become a veterinarian these days. The AVMA, VIN Foundation, and AAVMC have several resources that can be found in simple internet searches that show the incredible sum total of debt most veterinary students incur by the time they graduate. ​If you want specifics, please check them out:
http://atwork.avma.org/2015/10/22/what-you-need-to-know-about-paying-for-veterinary-school/
http://www.vinfoundation.org/apputil/project/defaultadv1.aspx?id=5327182&said=-1
http://aavmc.org/tuitionmap.aspx

In a nutshell, according to the 2015 AVMA Report on Veterinary Debt & Income, the average veterinary student who borrows for their education, graduates with over $150,000 in debt. Some owe over $200,000 and higher. Annual tuition and fees for veterinary school varies considerably among US veterinary colleges, but the cost of this education has increased by nearly 250% in 15 years! This means that the tuition I paid from 1992-1996 was around $5,000 per year and in 2014 at my CVM it was around $19,000 per year. Very few other expenses have increased by this much in such a short period of time and the same can be said about all higher learning. Consider the cost of college education compared to the cost of all other consumer goods (the CPI); for the period of 1980 to 2014, college tuition has increased 260%, more than twice the rate of increase in the CPI, which was 120% for the same period. (http://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-how-quickly-college-tuition-has-skyrocketed-since-1980-2015-7) 
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Are you sure you want to be a horse vet?
To those who are not veterinarians, this amount of debt might seem acceptable for becoming a doctor. The problem lies in the debt to income ratio that a newly graduated veterinarian with that enormous burden of debt will face. Also from the 2015 AVMA Report on Veterinary Income & Debt, the average starting veterinary salary in 2014 was $67,000;  mean starting salaries ranged as low as $43,000 (equine only) to $73,000 (food animal exclusive). This results in an average debt to income ratio of 2:1 (https://www.avma.org/PracticeManagement/BusinessIssues/Documents/2015_Report_on_the_Market_for_Veterinary_Education_Summary.pdf). By comparison, physicians often graduate with a much healthier debt to income ratio of 1:1.

Diversity deficiency
And here is where I want to remind us of something about veterinary medicine that not everyone is aware of: we are the whitest profession. Yes, we are not ethnically or racially diverse and in the United States, 95.2% of working veterinarians are white (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014). 

There has been a lot of discussion on this and many members of the profession embrace the need and desire to have a more racially and ethnically diverse population in veterinary medicine. But progress in this area has been slow. Theories abound about why underrepresented races and ethnicities are not in veterinary medicine and there are clear solutions that have been implemented at some veterinary colleges. To read more on this topic, I highly recommend Navigating Diversity and Inclusion in Veterinary Medicine (available on Amazon or from Purdue University Press).
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​The concern I would like to raise in this post is that the very cost of this education is a huge impediment to all students but especially to those of economically challenged backgrounds. We stand to lose so much if we do not achieve a more diverse profession, one with more members from under-represented groups (and the AAVMC definition of under-represented groups in veterinary medicine includes socioeconomic, geographic, and educationally disadvantaged individuals). If we are committed to the need for veterinary medicine to no longer be the whitest profession—we must make veterinary education accessible to those in lower economic brackets.

Hope for the future
I just found out about an exciting event, one that seems to have a chance for some real think-tank brainstorming from leaders and interested veterinary professionals. It’s called Fix the Debt…Our Future, Our Responsibility. Below is a link with information. Are you interested? Do you have creative ideas or solutions? If so, get to this summit and let’s make a difference for the future of the veterinary profession.
http://events.anr.msu.edu/event.cfm?folder=vetmedsummit