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Megan Cooper grew up on her family's Wellsville dairy farm, and, even as a college student she rises early to feed the cows in the morning, then milks them at night.
She didn't get to go on vacations growing up, but being around animals made up for that. Now, the Utah State University sophomore plans to make animal care her career. But she may have to leave the farm to pursue veterinary training in another state because Utah has no program, even though her university is a hotbed for agricultural and animal-science research.
"The veterinary field is one of the most competitive. Anywhere that would take me, that's where I would go. But I would like to stay close to home," Cooper said.
Some Utah lawmakers would like to keep Cooper on the farm, too, citing the state's vet shortage, particularly in rural areas. Under a proposed interstate program, Utah's aspiring veterinarians would complete the two first years of course work at USU, then go to Washington State University for clinical training while enjoying USU tuition.
This plan would enable an annual cohort of 20 Utah and 10 out-of-state students (as well as their tuition dollars) to remain in Utah for half their four-year tour at a cost to the state of $3 million, according to testimony Wednesday before the Legislature's Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee.
"It provides Utah an opportunity to control veterinary training for the next several years and allows us to provide a predictable number of graduates every year," said USU professor Kenneth White, who heads the department of animal, dairy and veterinary science.
Currently, Utah subsidizes up to six new students each year to pursue graduate veterinary training out of state, covering the tuition differential at a cost of about $800,000. Many others must cover the full tuition on their own, taking on big debt, according to Rep. John Mathis, R-Vernal, a veterinarian who plans to sponsor legislation authorizing the joint Utah-Washington program.
Although the USU proposal has been in the works for more than a year, it has yet to have an airing before the Board of Regents, the governor-appointed panel that crafts higher-education policy.
Subcommittee members gave the proposal a sympathetic reception Wednesday, but co-chairman Sen. John Valentine, R-Orem, urged proponents to secure regents' approval before the Mathis bill is introduced in the House. He noted the tension within state government over how new degree programs are authorized.
Weber State University's recent end-run around the regents to legislatively establish a new engineering program was the source of intense friction. While Utah already had various engineering programs, the same can't be said for graduate veterinary medicine.
USU has the academic capacity to teach the field, but not the expensive clinical infrastructure, where students lay their hands on live animals, White said. That's where Washington State, home to one of the nation's top veterinary programs with a long, successful history of interstate partnerships, comes in.
Funding a stand-alone vet school would cost Utah almost $20 million a year, White said.
He contends the proposal will result in a high-quality program that makes economic sense for the state and will not glut the market with veterinary graduates. He noted that Kansas, with the same population as Utah, graduates 45 veterinarians a year, while Utah supports only six.
Utah is home to 400 licensed veterinarians, and the state is losing about 10 a year to retirement, according to Mathis.
Because of poor pay in rural areas, most are concentrated in the cities. Still, the USU plan is geared toward meeting broad market needs and not just those of the agricultural community.
"We don't expect everyone to practice in rural Utah. Veterinary medicine has changed tremendously in the last 30 years. Our animals have moved indoors and become part of the family, " said Mathis, who was trained at Colorado State University.
"Let's face it, Utah is an urban state," he said. "This isn't just about livestock and rural Utah, a lot of this is your family members, your dogs, your cats and parrots."
Both Cooper and fellow pre-vet student Shelby Quarnberg, of Grantsville, hope to be among the proposed program's early enrollees if it launches in the fall of 2012 as planned.
"It's so hard to get into vet school, and there are so few we can go to. There a lot of kids doing my major," Quarnberg said. "It will really help a lot of students and the veterinary industry."