A recent article detailing the results of three AVMA-commissioned studies appeared in a popular trade publication last week. The title of the article? “Publicly revered, professionally taxed.” This headline aptly condensed the result of these multiple survey studies.
The upshot? People think we’re the most honest, respectable professionals when compared to physicians, attorneys, politicians and teachers. 93% of pet owners believe that their pets’ healthcare rivals their own. But 40% say we’re too expensive. Most also agree that vet prices have skyrocketed in recent years with 1/3 of these squarely laying blame at the veterinarian’s feet (the others say drug prices and inflation are to blame as well).
The good news for vets is that we are beginning to make more money. Why? Mostly because there are fewer of us to go around, what with the increasing demand among pet lovers—more than 50% of whom say that they’d pay a limitless amount to have their pet fixed. Problem is, it’s practice owners who are seeing a disproportionate amount of this new income.
The silver lining? Vet techs are also making more as practice owners begin to use them more effectively to do the technical work we vets have always done for ourselves.
So what’s the problem?, you might ask. At least your overall income is going up.
Problem is, our work hours are not keeping pace with the modest increase in income. Considering the number of hours we work, most of us would prefer to make less if we could just get a little more life out of our days.) And our student loans are climbing drastically, too. These vast sums are way out of proportion to our income. In the end, we’re still feeling the big squeeze.
The hardest hit? Our new graduates. So many pre-vets have figured this out that fewer of them are continuing on to vet school. Applications to vet school are still up there but, predictably, every year the number of male applicants drops another notch. And I fear that overall applicant qualifications will soon follow suit. That should worry you more than it does me, but, ultimately, it hurts all of us.
So what to do? We’re becoming a profession divided into the haves and have nots, unfortunately keeping pace with the US’s widening income gap. Something’s going to have to give. But with the number of vets considering the role of practice ownership now down to 40% (from almost 100% thirty years ago), I don’t see things changing anytime soon.
My solution? Addressing student debt through tax benefits on these gargantuan loans. For the love of God, at least make our school loan payments tax deductible. The fact that education isn’t tax deductible—while business expenses as frivolous as dinners (which we all manage to eat anyway) remain perfectly expensable—is an egregious insult to education and another example of how the haves keep their money while even upstart have nots suffer at their expense—literally.
You may believe this is naught but a tempest in a teapot—one annoyed [and not poorly paid] individual’s crybaby rant. But if we, as a society, value certain professions, then let society’s values help determine what considerations these professions deserve.
Problem is, it’s not educators or hyper-squeezed recent grads who make the rules—it’s the successful professionals, the lawyers and the politicians. No wonder the gap keeps getting wider.
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Let's walk all the way to the end of this dock, though. A smart young student sets her mind to being a veterinarian. She goes to, say, the University of Miami for a 4 year Bachelor's degree at a cost of about $215,000. She's an excellent student and shoots for, say, UF, Auburn, UGa and Tufts. It's a competitive process. Despite great grades and great scores, she is only admitted to Tufts. Well, no tragedy to get into Tufts, surely! By 2011, when she starts school, tuition there is up another good piece, let's say up 20% from today. So she borrows $265,000 for a professional education. She is now $480,000 in debt.
I understand that this is problematic, but as a taxpayer, I don't see it as >my< problem. She made the choice to borrow all that money. If, instead of being the fabulous Thing One, holder of a vigorously self-supporting career, I had opted to become my good twin, the soulful basket-weaver Thing One Prime at a cost of $480,000 , would you argue that I should get a break on my loans just because basket weavers don't make a good living?
Now, to make the math easy, let's say that her loans are $500k, at 5% for 10 years. At that rate, the interest amounts to about $140,000. So you are saying that me the taxpayer should give her a tax break-- effectively a bonus-- of $35,000, as a prize for having made the choice of being a vet.
Well, let's be realistic. Let's say that in 2015 there are 30 vet schools in the US, and at each of them there are 20 kids who have gotten into half this much loan trouble. Does that seem like a fair thumbnail sketch of where things are going? I think it's probably a decent guess. At that more reasonable rate, each year we (the taxpayers) will be adding on a new "vet career subsidy" load of $10,000,000. Cheap compared to buying an airplane, but you could buy a heck of a lot of school lunches for the money that would pile up subsidizing the vet industry over time.
And what does that buy you? (Well, happy vets, yes, but...) It doesn't do anything to solve the underlying problem, which is that this industry is locked into a model that doesn't work. It would be an abysmal bit of public policy.
I think a better answer is to let the bottom fall out. The country has a substantial need for vets in other jobs-- public health, etc. If the bottom falls out tomorrow, those jobs become filled with better-paid, more secure former associates who already exist and not by new bodies being trained. If the bottom falls out, the price of an office visit comes to depend not on what the market really will bear. You said yourself, people are willing to put money into their pets. The fact is, the segment of the public that is willing to pay is not going to get anywhere near paying what they're willing to pay until some pretty severe market seismology forces their hand.
Plus, you know what? I believe that even if half of the kids in every school were leaving up to their ears in debt, you could still fill every one of those seats. Just like you can reliably fill every seat in Juilliard, no matter what the climate is for that kind of career. So, as a pet owner, I'm not expecting to have to ponder what I'm willing to pay to keep my animals any time soon.
Thing One March 8th, 2007 10:28:00 PM
I have to agree with One Thing about this.
I know a fistful of college students. None of them are going to vet school, but there are some serious problems brewing and nobody is doing anything about it.
All of the said college students have loans, which is fine and all of the are working while going to school, which is also great. However, the money that they being given for their education and making on their own is not being used to feed themselves or to buy materials they need for their classes. Instead these funds are being used to buy booze, parties, cars they cannot afford, expensive electronic "toys" ( Playstation 3) and to pay for trips which are also not education related.
This problem continues to snowball as the parents of these students continue to reach into their deep pockets to keep their students fed and clothed, which in some cases, I seriously doubt that some of these parents can really afford to do that. I have to wonder how much credit card debt and what the interest rates are on their second mortage to support their childs lack of financial responsibilty.
I know a number of college grads that feel as though paying back their student loan isn't a big priority in life. It's more fun to rack up huge credit card bills on frivilous crap, which leads to even more excuses as to why they cannot make minimal payments on their loans or now high credit card debt.
These said grads mostly complain about credit card debt because credit cards have a variable interest rate which only continues to increase as credit scores continue to plummet, but it doesn't keep them from their shopping sprees either as credit scores mean nothing as after all, they have a college education. What these ignorant grads fail to realise is that a college education doesn't make them exempt from reality. Reality states that if you do not pay your bills on time, you will end up hurting yourself in the long run when you decide to buy a home, get a car loan or anything else that requires a good, solid credit history, but they don't think like that. Everything is about right now, which in the end will bite them in the a--, but to tell them otherwise falls on deaf ears.
As a taxpayer, I'd be pissed if I had to pick up tab for these current students and grads, as I know that even if a tax break was applied, the money wouldn't go back into their loans. It would be viewed as "free money" and treated as such. There wouldn't be anything to show for it other than a hike on my tax bill of which none of them care about.
I agree with you Dr.Patty that vets put in long hours and sometimes do so without as much as a "Thank You" or pat on the back, but tax breaks are not a solution. It will just cause further financial issues in a society that is up to it's ears in debt already. Forget about all the debt that is going on in the political front with Iraq and state goverment pet projects, I'm talking about personal debt. Also know that this reply is not directed at you personally. If I were to live in Florida and you and I became good friends, I'd watch your son and walk your dogs free of charge because I know what it is like to live under a single parent roof and the struggles my mother and I went through.
College students just like anybody else in society needs to be held accountable for their actions and that includes financial responsibilty. If they are smart enough to get into law school, they should be smart enough to know how to create a budget and live within their means. How is it that student loans can be used for everything but a students education, and why should I pick up the tab for that? Perhaps as a start, that needs to change for starters. Parents also need to step up to the plate and take some responsiblity themselves. Tough love isn't fun, but who is going to pay their debt when they are no longer around to bail their kids out?
It's an ungly problem that has so many layers and is only continuing to worsen with time. I haven't bothered to mention what I think of most colleges, the prices that they charge and the lacking of teaching the basic concepts of day to day life, but I'll save that for another day. I have to get ready to crawl down the necks of certain people at the elementary school for all their little issues that are also snowballing into a major problem.
Stacy March 9th, 2007 07:03:00 AM
Of course, one must first separate frivolous debt from non-frivolous debt. Federal student loans are a good way of doing that. They only pay a small percentage of tuition. Beyond that, the total loan amounts "subsidized" by the federal government in the form of tax relief needn't be any greater than the cost of a [market forces level] of tuition.
What I'm suggesting is that education be far more subsidized from beginning to end. As it stands, only the rich can afford to go to school and not be left with mountains of debt. If our country believes that education in science, technology and related service sectors is truly the path to global competitiveness (that's what the general consensus is--and I agree with it), then our education standards are going to have to climb. The only way to do that is by subsidizing education--from K through grad school--to a tune far higher than we currently do. Allowing for tax deductibility on student loans (as you calculate) is a tiny drop in the bucket, taxwise, compared with the tax freedoms allowed many of our decaying industries.
IMHO, it's GREAT public policy to subsidize education. Besides government and physical infrastructure, basic public welfare and a "reasonable" national defense, nothing comes close. And yet none of these receives so small a slice of the pie.
OK--rant over.
Dr. Patty Khuly March 9th, 2007 02:58:00 PM
Now, don't be disingenuous. A government subsidizing good education "from beginning to end' would surely do well do define a whole education as K-12, not K-20. And at least in my neighborhood, we're taxed plenty to subsidize K-12 education. It's not poor public policy to support education. But it's not wise policy to use the limited pool of money available to support the education of professionals who are going to have lifetime incomes 4-5 x greater than people who only finish high school.
Can only the rich afford to go to school and not be left with mountains of debt? I'm a counterexample to that statement. But though my family's working class, I was educated via merit scholarships, which are now being painted as unfair. So who knows? It seems to me the message is that if your smart but broke, you've got to line up for charity: no fair using your cranium to move yourself and your family ahead!
It's fun to think about what life must be like for the middle class students at Harvard, where families making less than $60k have been defined as so needy that they do not need to pay tuition. Can you imagine the Harvard board shuddering at the horror of living in a household that makes only 20% more than the median American family of four? Surely some members felt the need to swoon. Poor dears.
But enough of me going on about that. I'd really like to see you write some on how you view the impact of the rapid feminization of your profession on salaries and the work itself.
Thing One March 9th, 2007 08:40:00 PM
( er, read that "If -you're- smart but broke". I may be overeducated but I sure cain't write in English.)
T1 March 9th, 2007 08:43:00 PM
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