Utah State will open veterinary college this fall

Utah’s first four-year veterinary college is one step closer to becoming accredited by the AVMA Council on Education (AVMA COE).

Utah State University (USU) College of Veterinary Medicine announced that it received a letter of reasonable assurance on March 26 after the council met March 13-15. The decision is based on a comprehensive site visit that took place October 27-31, 2024, in Logan, Utah.

Dr. Dirk Vanderwall, dean of Utah State’s veterinary college, said in a statement that receiving the letter means that the USU program’s planned actions are reasonable and feasible to allow the veterinary college to meet the council’s 11 standards of accreditation.

Reasonable assurance does not confer accreditation of any kind for a developing college, but the college may gain accreditation in the future if it shows the AVMA COE that it continues to develop and implement its plans in a way that meets all of the standards.

The veterinary school has opened applications for enrollment and will accept its first class this fall.

USU Interim President Alan L. Smith said in the statement: “This is an incredibly important milestone for the College of Veterinary Medicine at USU. Reaching this point speaks to the committed efforts of the faculty, staff and administrators in the CVM, USU leadership, and the many stakeholders across the state who fervently supported the establishment of the college.”

Successful partnership

Since 2012, Utah State has been a partner in the Washington-Idaho-Montana-Utah (WIMU) Regional Program in veterinary medicine. As part of a 2+2 program, veterinary students spend their first two years at Utah State and finish the last two years at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.

Around 30 students—20 of whom must be Utah residents—are admitted to USU’s program each year. Students who are Utah residents continued to pay in-state tuition after they moved to Washington state, subsidized by funding from the state of Utah.

Based on the success of the partnership program, and the recognition of a continuing need for more veterinarians in Utah, the state legislature approved plans and funding in 2022 for a standalone veterinary college. Following the legislative session, Utah State requested a consultative site visit from the AVMA COE, which took place in September 2023.

Now, with the latest accreditation action, the USU veterinary college will start the first cohort of 40 students this fall, then build up to 80-student classes over time. These students will spend all four years at Utah State.

Tuition and fees for first-year students are $27,658 for those from in state and $52,686 for those from out of state.

Last year, the university signed an agreement with the state of Nevada to allow the neighboring state’s residents accepted into the new program to pay in-state tuition with Nevada paying the remainder.

USU’s participation in the WIMU program will sunset after the Class of 2028 graduates.

Clinical education

Establishment of the new veterinary college includes construction of a 106,000 square-foot Veterinary Medical Education (VME) building on the USU campus that is slated to open in the summer of 2026. The VME building will be used for academic instruction in the first three years of the program.

Meanwhile, new laboratories, classrooms, offices, and study spaces will soon be ready in the Agriculture Sciences Building in time for the inaugural class.

Rather than constructing a teaching hospital, the program will adopt a distributive model to place fourth-year students in a network of community-based private veterinary practices throughout the Intermountain West for clinical training.

Nadia Pflaum, public relations specialist with USU’s veterinary college, said, “We anticipate developing a network of more than 100 private practices across a wide spectrum of practice types to serve as host sites for our fourth-year students, and we are already seeing tremendous interest from practitioners about serving in that capacity.”

Dr. Vanderwall, who was named dean in July 2024, was recruited to Utah State in 2012 to help start the WIMU program. He initially taught equine reproduction in USU’s Department of Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Sciences.

Dr. Vanderwall received his veterinary degree in 1986 from Cornell University and a doctorate in animal physiology in 1992 from the University of Idaho. He is a diplomate of the American College of Theriogenologists.

The AVMA COE currently accredits 35 veterinary colleges in the United States, five of which are developing colleges with provisional accreditation. These veterinary colleges are located in 28 states and Puerto Rico.

The AVMA COE also accredits five veterinary colleges in Canada and 18 additional veterinary colleges in Europe (nine), Australia (four), New Zealand (one), South Korea (one), Mexico (one), and the Caribbean (two).

Correction: A previous version of this story’s headline misstated the accreditation status of Utah State University.