Rowan University president lays down 10-year vision, wants college to drive region’s economic growth
The long-time leader of the South Jersey institution has begun to seek community input to design his vision for the next decade.
2 years ago
In the clinical skills lab at the Shreiber School of Veterinary Medicine, students can practice on models. (Emma Lee/WHYY)
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Aparna Zama, undergraduate program director at Rutgers University’s Department of Animal Sciences, has been a pre-vet advisor for eight years. During that time, she has sent a lot of students aspiring to be veterinarians out of New Jersey.
“You multiply 25 through the years … that’s how many students we’ve been sending out,” she said.
According to Rutgers, students from New Jersey have gone on to Cornell, The Ohio State University and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, to pursue a veterinary science degree.
With the opening of the Shreiber School for Veterinary Medicine at Rowan University this year, Zama said that trend is going to change.
“This is a very exciting development for our students, the parents and in general for the profession in New Jersey,” she said. “We have been waiting for this for a long time.”
Though classes for the incoming Class of 2029 began in September, Rowan and New Jersey officials formally celebrated Friday the completion of New Jersey’s first veterinarian school with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a tour of the new facility that took 18 months to build.
Edward D. Wengryn, New Jersey’s secretary of agriculture, said the opening of the school goes beyond retaining students in the state. It opens up a host of other opportunities.
“Not just practices like on the corner vet services, but the technicians, the research side of this to make those innovations in animal healthcare that we’re looking for,” he said.
Dr. Jennifer Quammen, president-elect of the American Veterinary Medical Association, said rural areas, like much of South Jersey, are hurting more amid a nationwide shortage of veterinarians.
“Whether that is large animal, meaning like cattle, horses; that is an area we need,” she said. “But even rural medicine for small animals … we need that as well.”
Aspiring veterinarians from New Jersey would leave the state, sometimes taking a gap year to establish residency where their school is located so they can save money on tuition.
“Quite a few were having to take all kinds of routes to pay in-state tuition in the state that they were going to be going to vet school,” Zama said.
Wengryn said that while they have great relationships with schools in neighboring states, they learned that the students “don’t really come home to the Garden State.”
“When you get there, you get settled, you start developing your practice there, you stay there,” he said.
With Rowan’s veterinary school established, the hope is that students who want to be veterinarians will stay in the state and reverse the drain of talent.
“This is the opportunity to have students that were born and raised in New Jersey, work in New Jersey, experience the opportunities that are here to develop their practices here,” Wyngryn said.
Though there is no definite answer, officials pointed to two factors that determined why one of the most populous states in the country went without a veterinarian school for so long.
“I think as the agriculture industry shrunk, the need for large livestock kind of went away,” Wengryn said.
The late-Dr. Donald F. Smith, dean emeritus at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, made a similar observation in a 2013 essay.
Before the 1920s, he wrote, most veterinarian colleges were for-profit schools with varying quality. Many of those schools faded away due to decreased enrollment as the role of the horses became diminished in society.
The cost to start a school is another concern, according to Zama, who described it as “a very expensive proposition.”
“The resources that have to be put into building out a vet school, running the curriculum and develop professional veterinarians is a very intensive process,” she said. “It needs a lot of initial inputs in terms of resources, facilities, so on and so forth.”
When Rowan officials announced that they would be launching their school in 2021, they announced that the university had received a $75 million commitment from the state to build the facility. The school also received a $30 million donation from J&J Snack Foods chair Gerald Shreiber, the school’s namesake, which would go towards scholarships.
WHYY News is still awaiting the final cost of their investment.
More than half of the inaugural group of 75 students at Shreiber are from New Jersey. Rowan officials said they would eventually admit 90 students a year.
Maya Quinn and Paul Alves are excited to be part of the inaugural class of students.
“I’m a Jersey girl, born and raised,” said Quinn, a Barnegat native. “I love my state and I’m just so proud to have been able to be here.”
“I am also a homebody. I have a big family,” said Alves, who hails from Elmwood Park. “I really, really did want to stay close to home. And when Schreiber was announced to be opening in the fall of 2025, I was stoked.”
As state residents, they have the added bonus of saving a great deal of money in tuition.
It will cost $37,500 a year for in-state Rowan students, which is about $30,000 cheaper than what Pennsylvania residents would pay to attend the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, a private institution.
Rowan is in the middle of the pack for resident tuition, when compared to other public institutions like the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine and the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. Though an Ivy League institution, Cornell’s school is a contract college through the State University of New York system.
Out-of-state students pay considerably higher to attend veterinary school.
Rowan is charging nonresidents $58,500 this year, which is below what is charged by Cornell, Penn and Virginia-Maryland College.
Attached to the Shreiber School is a 50,000-square-foot teaching animal hospital that offers primary care, specialty care and emergency services, which will open Monday.
The school has gone out into the communities to operate free clinics and perform spay and neuter procedures. They also have four field service clinicians to visit large animals through South Jersey.
Amanda Coombs, president of Coombs Barnyard in Salem County, was excited when she heard about the school. She also saw an opportunity for kids to learn about people who take care of animals.
“I thought they might come out to farm camp and talk to my campers about becoming a veterinarian,” she said. “It’s another aspect of agriculture that I feel like we need to teach kids.”
She said she is thinking about making an offer to Rowan.
“I’ve thought about just contacting Rowan to say, ‘Do you have a vet student that wants large animal experience?’” she said. “Even if it was an internship, come here and see what it takes to take care of them and tend to them because it’s a lot.”