Just because the vast majority of recent veterinary college graduates -- at Cornell and nationally -- are women doesn't mean that droves are women are applying to veterinary school. What is really going on, said Cornell's dean of veterinary medicine, is that far fewer people are applying to vet school, and the rate of decline is more visible among men than women.

The feminization of veterinary medicine is also because the pool of potential DVM candidates on prevet tracks has substantially narrowed in recent years, said Donald F. Smith, the Austin O. Hooey Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, June 9, to about 50 Cornell veterinary alumni during Cornell Reunion Weekend.

Smith, who is serving the final weeks of his 10-year deanship, gave a talk, "Changing Veterinary Medicine: Reflections of a Cornell Dean," in the John D. Murray Lecture Hall of Cornell's Veterinary Education Center.

Cornell actually graduated the first female veterinarian -- Florence Kimball -- in the United States in 1910, and seven of the first 11 women to become licensed veterinarians in this country were Cornell graduates. However, it was only in the last 30 years that veterinary schools, including Cornell, starting accepting more female applicants to the once male-oriented field.

Starting in the early 1980s, Smith said, Cornell began to graduate more women; from 1981 to 1986, the number of female veterinary graduates grew from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent of the class.

The higher female to male ratio in DVM programs does not concern Smith -- the real threat to the field, he said, is the steady decline of applicants.

"We have not kept up the pace in applicants when compared to other professional schools," said Smith. The 142 accredited U.S. medical schools receive nearly 40,000 applicants, compared with the 6,500 applications that the about 30 accredited North American veterinary schools receive.

Smith stressed a need to come up with ways to recruit not a "different" pool of candidates, but "another" pool to veterinary medicine.

"We need an additional 1,000 applicants, and we need to recruit from pools with a different mission," Smith said, proposing that premed, prelaw and business students might serve as potential future targets.

Graduate student Sandra Holley is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.