The power to decide who can train, test, and practice as a veterinarian has been handed to private organizations that answer to no one. That's the root of the shortage.
When you can't get a vet appointment for weeks, or the bill is higher than you expected, it's natural to assume that's just how the market works. It isn't. In the United States, the gates into the veterinary profession — who may open a school, who may sit for the licensing exam, and who may practice — are controlled by two private organizations that operate without public oversight: the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the trade association of practicing veterinarians, and the International Council for Veterinary Assessment (ICVA), which owns the only licensing exam.
Compare that to human medicine, where the same functions are spread across competing, publicly accountable bodies. A university that wants to open a medical school can choose between two competing accreditors. The U.S. opens roughly two new medical schools every year. The veterinary profession, by contrast, has had only about 34 schools for roughly 45 years — a figure the U.S. Department of Justice cited in a December 2025 court filing — because a single accreditor, run by the very profession that benefits from scarcity, controls the gate.
The result is exactly what you would predict when supply is controlled by those who profit from keeping it low: too few graduates, climbing costs, and communities left without care.
Accountability. When licensing and accreditation decisions are made in private, there is no way to challenge them. Published decisions, open data, and public hearings let the public see why a school was denied or a class size capped — and contest it when the reason doesn't hold up.
Competition. Human medicine's two-accreditor system creates pressure to approve good new schools rather than block them. Veterinary medicine's single gatekeeper faces no such pressure. Introducing competition or genuine state supervision would break the logjam.
Transparency in testing. The national veterinary exam is owned by a private nonprofit that publishes almost nothing about how it's built or scored and bars candidates from even discussing it. No exam that every veterinarian must pass should operate as a black box.
None of this requires lowering standards. It requires moving the standards out of private hands and into public view. Under a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision, a licensing body controlled by the people who compete in the market it regulates does not automatically enjoy immunity from antitrust law unless a state actively supervises it — which most states do not. That gap is where reform begins.
You can help: ask your state legislators to require transparency from veterinary boards, and join NAVEC's briefing list to follow the campaign.
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