The AVMA has released a position statement which indicates they believe there will be enough veterinarians to continue to meet demand thru 2035 - based on the existing Veterinary School Programs (as in already graduating veterinarians). I believe this is exclusive of the somewhat regularly march of expanding class sizes in existing schools. And it’s exclusive of the schools already building their programs as w well as schools ‘announcing’ their intentions to start a veterinary school. This suggests the AVMA believes there will be a fairly large net surplus of Veterinarians beginning sometime in the next few years and likely for the foreseeable future…which for most of your children would be much of their practice career.
Not to be a downer here - but for profit education as well as the ‘traditional’ state schools have discovered the disconnect between the numbers of kids who want to be veterinarians, their willingness to take on large debt, the governments willingness to back this debt (and pay the schools up front), and the future demand for services (salary).
Taking that a step further - the corporate and private equity assimilation of what used to be privately owned practices has eliminated a lot of the Veterinarian/Business Owner compensation - which is where some veterinarians were able to escalate their compensation into the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars… which obviously would make paying your educational debt off that much easier. The large majority of DVM graduates will not become Business Owners, so that multiples of Veterinarian compensation that comes with owning the practice and managing your professional colleagues is disappearing.
Alternatively, Specialty Practice does pay better than General Practice, but comes with 4-5 more years of school, delayed payment on educational debt, and it’s own headaches.