Mamma Don't Let Your Daughter Grow Up to Be A Veterinarian

Today's New York Sunday Times has an article about the Vet Debt Trap, which is one of the saddest articles the Phantom has read in years.

There are 92 thousand veterinarians in the USA, far more, apparently than there is work for. Dog and  especially cat ownership has fallen for decades, and numbers of horses has declined, for reasons unstated (The drought in the West? Europeans eating them in fast food restaurants?)

Vet school at a state university runs about $30 thousand dollars a year, and for those who cannot get into these schools, which have roughly one place for every ten applicants, there is always the offshore, Caribbean Ross school of veterinary medicine, a for profit, but accredited school which runs $63 thousand a year.

All this for a job which pays $45-60 thousand a year. Graduates of veterinary colleges can look forward to $300,000 of debt coming due about 20 years from now, just as their children are looking to go to college.

Why, you might ask, would anyone doing this calculus even think of a career in veterinary medicine? 

The answer lies in the dreams of little girls. For girls who are wild about animals, who have had pets of their own and taken them to the local vet, this is a job which they know about from childhood, and it melds their love of animals with an answer to the question of "What do you want to be, when you grow up?"

In a sense, this article is about something more important and more universal than a story about the quandary of veterinarians. It is really about how we groom each generation for the working lives they need to live. The clear answer is, we do not do a very good jobs. One reason the children of doctors tend to want to be doctors, (if their parents don't discourage them) is that is what they know. They have some idea of what that job, the work is like. They cannot imagine being an engineer or a plant manager because they have no idea what those jobs are about.

Many pre medical students are thrust into taking organic chemistry because their parents wanted them to be doctors and they had no idea what else they might want to do. Most college students have visited a doctor and have some idea what that job is, or at least they think they have some idea from watching television.  Since the advent of "ER" they probably have at least some idea of what being a doctor is all about.

But, for the most part, the working lives of adults are hidden from children, and that is a major problem for the United States of America.

Our "free" market economy is, of course, not free. Mobility in this country where any boy or girl can grow up to be President is, in fact, among the worst in the industrialized "first world" countries. We cling to our fanatasies, here in the US of A. It can be nice to have stars in your eyes, but not if that sets you on a path to life long debt and financial distress. 

The Phantom does not know what the solution is to guiding America's youth into satisfactory careers, but he suspects until this aimlessness, no, cluelessness is seen as a real problem, many lives will be lived unhappily and our economy will be the worse for it.