Thousands of trained veterinarians are living in this country and are not allowed to work. To be licensed, they must pass a $12,804 examination that one private association promises will measure them against a new American graduate. That association also writes the rules for American veterinary schools. Set the two documents side by side and they do not match.
Somewhere in America this month, a veterinarian who has practiced for twenty years is refreshing a web page, hoping a seat opens. She is not applying to veterinary school. She finished veterinary school. She is waiting for a three-day examination that will decide whether she may work at all, and she has been told it measures her against a new graduate of an American veterinary school.
It does not. And the organization that told her so wrote the rules for those American schools.
NAVEC's sixth research report, False Equivalency: The Double Standard Behind the Veterinary Shortage, is a comparison of three documents. All three are public. Two of them belong to the same private association, which is the point.
The American Veterinary Medical Association, the AVMA, is the private trade association that represents veterinarians already in practice. It is not a government agency. It runs two programs that together control both entrances to the profession.
Its Council on Education is the sole accreditor of veterinary schools in the United States. It writes the standards every school must meet for its graduates to be eligible for a license.
Its Educational Commission for Foreign Veterinary Graduates runs a fee-based assessment program that every state requires of veterinarians educated abroad. It decides whether they meet the same standard, and may therefore be licensed. Its final step is a three-day, seven-section, hands-on examination given at exactly two places in the country.
The examination "is designed to assess the candidate's practical clinical veterinary skills at the level of a day-one-ready graduate of an AVMA/COE-accredited veterinary school/college."
That sentence is from the AVMA's own 2026 examination manual. Its candidate bulletin says the same thing a second way: the standard for passing each section is the level "expected of a minimally competent new graduate" of an accredited school. Its program policies say the program "assesses educational equivalency."
Those are precise claims about a written standard. So we read the standard.
The examination manual is specific in a way few licensing documents are. It names the animal, the procedure, the candidate's role, the help she may accept, the clock, and the mistake that ends the attempt.
Every section must be passed on its own. A candidate strong in six and short in one has failed the examination.
The Council on Education's accreditation standard, the one the promise names, requires a substantial veterinary education: at least 130 weeks of instruction, at least 40 weeks of hands-on clinical work, experience across a broad range of species, and assessment against nine broad competencies.
It requires none of the things on that list.
"While precise numbers are not specified." · "The curriculum in veterinary medicine is the purview of the faculty of each college."
No named operation. No named species for every student. No time limit. No passing score on any individual task. The standard names domains, and each school decides how to teach and assess them.
You do not have to take our word for how schools read that latitude, because they publish it. At one accredited college, a student satisfies the surgery outcome by "providing retraction, instrumentation, or other tasks as needed," and graduates with a score the school's own scale defines as "developing" competency rather than day-one ready. At another, the surgical requirement is one spay, neuter or castration on a stable patient, judged by supervisors across a year. Several accredited colleges let students track into small-animal practice and spend the clinical year with dogs and cats. Every one of these schools is accredited. What they publish is therefore what the Council on Education accepts as meeting its standard.
We did not have to argue this one. The AVMA's own candidate bulletin states that the examination "assesses a subset of the entry-level clinical veterinary skills taught in an AVMA/Council on Education veterinary school." A subset is, by definition, less than the whole.
And its own published answers to candidates state that successful completion of "the final year (clinical year) in an AVMA COE accredited program cannot be accepted" in place of the examination.
Read those two sentences together. The clinical year of an American accredited veterinary school produces a licensed American veterinarian. The same association says that year is not sufficient to excuse a foreign veterinarian from an examination it describes as measuring equivalence to a graduate of that year. Both positions cannot describe a single standard.
A misrepresentation can be innocent when the speaker does not know the facts. This speaker wrote them.
The Council on Education and the foreign-graduate program are two programs of one association, staffed by one AVMA division, at one address in Schaumburg, Illinois, under one senior executive whose portfolio, in the association's own announcement, covers "accreditation of colleges/schools of veterinary medicine" and "certification programs for ... foreign veterinary graduates."
So there are two possibilities and no third. Either the program knows the standard contains none of the examination's tasks and describes the examination as measuring that standard anyway, or it has never placed the two documents side by side. Neither is an honest basis for charging $12,804 under the word "equivalency," or for telling fifty state licensing boards that the certificate means what it says.
The AVMA reported to its own House of Delegates in February that applications have risen to roughly 600 a year, that more than 2,000 candidates are active in the program, and that it issues about 220 certificates annually. Six hundred in. Two hundred and twenty out. The difference accumulates in a queue.
The examination is offered at two sites, with about 570 seats a year for a pool of more than 2,000 people. The AVMA's own answer to candidates puts the first-time pass rate at "about 25%." A failed section costs $4,571, and a candidate who declines the next date offered must retake the entire examination and pay the full fee again. A seven-year clock runs the whole time, and it does not stop while a candidate waits for a seat she cannot control.
These are not students. They are veterinarians. Some of them are Americans who studied abroad, including graduates of Caribbean schools that were accredited a year or two after they left. One of them, Dr. Mariana Pardo, earned her degree in Chile, completed internships in Georgia and Florida, a residency at Cornell, and board certification in emergency and critical care. She failed the examination's anesthesia section twice and finished the program twelve years after she started it. American specialists had already trusted her with the most critically ill patients in the hospital.
Human medicine certified 13,431 internationally trained physicians in a single year. International graduates are one quarter of all practicing U.S. physicians. Medicine abolished its own hands-on examination in 2021 after its owners could not show it was "appreciably better" than nothing. Veterinary medicine issues about 220 certificates a year, and raised the price of its examination by 68 percent.
Whether you finished it, are still waiting for a seat, failed a section, ran out of time on the seven-year clock, or looked at the cost and never enrolled at all, your experience is the part of this record that no document can supply. We also want to hear from veterinarians and educators who think we have this wrong, and we will publish serious disagreement alongside the rest. Tell us what happened in your own words, and say whether we may quote you by name, use it anonymously, or keep it private.
Share your story →America is short of veterinarians by every measure we can find. Families wait for appointments, emergency hospitals cannot fill schedules, rural practices go uncovered, and shelters ration surgery. NAVEC's need-based assessment puts the 2026 shortfall at roughly 37,000 full-time veterinarians.
Building a veterinary school takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The 2,000 people in this queue already have the degree. They are the fastest supply the country has, and they are being held out by an instrument that does not measure what it says it measures, administered by the association whose members they would compete with.
We make no claim about anyone's intent, and the report says so in plain terms. Intent lives in records we cannot see. What the public record shows is a structure: one private association defines the domestic standard, controls the only nationwide route for everyone else, sets the price, holds the capacity, and describes the result to fifty state governments in a word its own documents contradict.
In December 2025 the Justice Department told a federal court, in a case about this same association's accreditation arm, that accreditors "face an inherent conflict of interest when regulating admission into a profession." That filing concerned the Council on Education, which at least undergoes federal review. The foreign-graduate program undergoes none.
Not lower standards. A real one, honestly described, applied by someone accountable to the public.
There is a proven alternative, and the AVMA used to run it. Until 2007 its own program accepted a year of supervised, evaluated clinical work instead of the examination. It ended that option and has never published evidence that the three-day examination produces safer veterinarians. States can verify the degree, require the national examination, and then measure competence the way competence is actually revealed: over twelve to twenty-four months of paid, supervised practice, with the board holding the authority to restrict, remediate, or refuse.
Read the full report: False Equivalency (PDF, 53 pages) The section-by-section comparison of the examination against the accreditation standard and against nine accredited colleges' published graduation rules; the cost and capacity arithmetic in full; the governance appendix; and the questions federal and state enforcers should put under compulsory process. 67 sources, all public.What can I do? Share this with one person who has waited for a veterinary appointment. If you have taken part in the ECFVG program at any stage, or decided against it, tell us your story. We read every one, and we want the disagreements too. If you work with a state veterinary board or a legislator, ask them one question: before your state wrote this private certificate into its rules, what did anyone here review?
Every fact in this article is drawn from public records and cited in full in the report: the AVMA's 2026 Manual of Administration for the Clinical Proficiency Examination, its Clinical Proficiency Examination Candidate Bulletin, its published answers for candidates, its fee schedule and appeal procedure, the AVMA Council on Education's Accreditation Policies and Procedures, the published clinical handbooks and curriculum pages of nine accredited veterinary colleges, AVMA News reporting of its own program statistics, VIN News Service reporting, and the U.S. Department of Justice's Statement of Interest in Lincoln Memorial University v. AVMA. Characterizations drawn from litigation filings are the positions of the parties asserting them and are not findings of any court. Quotations are reproduced verbatim. NAVEC makes no claim about any individual's intent; where a question depends on knowledge or intent, the report identifies the records that would answer it and asks that they be obtained. NAVEC is happy to be fact-checked and corrects the record when shown better evidence.
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