long island university vet school acceptance rate
The university admits 83 percent of applicants, but only 12 percent of those admitted choose to attend. Less than half of students graduate. Opposition to the project has been growing among faculty members, albeit quietly.Long Island University building vet school despite staff cuts and declining enrollment
“We thought it was — I don’t want to overstate — it was a very comprehensive and productive visit. We certainly felt positively about it as we continue to move forward,” Schneider said.
The plans are raising eyebrows on campus and off. Faculty leaders think the idea makes no sense. LIU is not up to par with the research universities, typically land-grant institutions, that house vet schools. And New York State already has a vet school — generally considered among the best — at Cornell University.
“A normal university doesn’t fire a bunch of its tenure track every year. It’s a lack of investment in those of us who are already here,” Emily Drabinski, faculty librarian at LIU Brooklyn, said. “I think people don’t feel the university is invested in them, and in their careers and keeping them around. Turnover in the administration is really intense. If you don’t have union protection, your job is in jeopardy really every day.”
“With regard to resource decisions here and the college of veterinary medicine, what we’re doing with the vet school … that is completely separate and apart from any decisions that are being made at Long Island University,” he said. “While I can’t get into personnel matters and why decisions are and aren’t being made, with all due respect, if anyone is giving you their opinion about what they think is going on, that opinion is off base.”
“The faculty are generally very dubious about the vet school,” States wrote in an email. “There are so many needs for investment to shore up existing buildings, infrastructure, programs, departments, student services, etc. that its very hard to see how this big of a gamble makes sense, especially given how expensive it is to run a vet school and how few students it can ultimately serve.”
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Dr. Carmen Fuentealba, dean of the newly accredited Long Island University College of Veterinary Medicine in New York state, knew what needed to be done to open a veterinary college and she did it swiftly.
Dr. Carmen Fuentealba, dean of the Long Island College of Veterinary Medicine, has been a founding faculty member of two veterinary colleges that successfully became accredited by the AVMA Council on Education. (Courtesy of LIU)
“The university is behind this project, and it has been a really easy process from that point of view,” she said.
LIU, a private institution, will welcome its first 100 veterinary students in August to its Post campus in Brookville, about 27 miles east of New York City.
The veterinary college received a letter of reasonable assurance from the AVMA Council on Education in October. The veterinary college got the go-ahead just two years after applying for a comprehensive site visit from the COE—a quick turnaround for the accrediting body. Typically, potential veterinary programs ask for a consultative site visit to gauge how the COE will evaluate them before moving on to a comprehensive site visit (see chart). A letter of reasonable assurance is not a pre-accreditation action, but indicates that the institution may gain accreditation in the future if the program follows through with all the plans it presented to the COE.
It helps that Dr. Fuentealba is no stranger to the accreditation process. She was a founding faculty member and associate dean for clinical programs from September 2002 to July 2007 at Western University of Health Sciences College of Veterinary Medicine in Pomona, California, which received a letter of reasonable assurance in 2001, and a founding faculty member and assistant dean for student affairs from August 2007 to January 2011 at the University of Calgary College of Veterinary Medicine in Alberta, which received a letter of reasonable assurance in 2007. She was also the senior associate dean for program assessment and executive associate dean for teaching and learning from February 2011 to August 2017 at Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine in Basseterre, St. Kitts, which became accredited in 2011.
She said the experience at these three programs taught her how the accreditation process works and that LIU’s success with the first step toward accreditation resulted, in part, from the veterinary college being able to quickly schedule a comprehensive site visit with the COE. The university hired Dr. Fuentealba in August 2017.
The council received a request for a comprehensive site visit and at its March 2018 meeting granted a request for an August 2018 site visit.
“The next opening wasn’t until three years later, so we jumped. We had consultants that reviewed the documents that I prepared to register the program with the New York State Education Department as well as the self-study. They confirmed what we needed to do, and we prepared to address the areas of weakness.”
Amid the positive news from the COE, LIU has been dealing with some challenging issues the past few years, including conflicts between the leadership and faculty, a decrease in enrollment numbers, and a low graduation rate.
The U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, a tool that uses data to compare institutions in the U.S., lists the graduation rate at LIU as 51% with a first-year retention rate of 76%. Specifically, out of 3,020 full- and part-time students, a little over half graduated, 37% transferred, and 12% withdrew.