Clemson Makes History as South Carolina’s First Veterinary Class Arrives

Eighty students are making history this fall as Clemson welcomes South Carolina’s first class of veterinary students, launching a new DVM program designed to train more veterinarians while rethinking where—and how—future doctors get their clinical experience.

For the first time, South Carolina students who dream of becoming veterinarians can earn their DVM without leaving the state.

This August, Clemson University is welcoming its inaugural class of 80 veterinary students, marking a major milestone for the university and for South Carolina. Sixty members of the Class of 2030 are South Carolina residents, while 20 come from outside the state. When they graduate four years from now, they will become the first veterinarians to earn their DVM degrees from Clemson.

The arrival of the first class follows a remarkably fast buildout. Clemson's Board of Trustees approved the creation of the veterinary school in June 2023, construction began in November 2024, and students are now arriving at a new veterinary campus located on 87 acres adjacent to the Clemson Experimental Forest.

For South Carolina, however, this is about much more than adding another professional degree to a university campus. Clemson is building the program in response to two problems facing veterinary medicine simultaneously: there aren't enough veterinary school seats for qualified applicants, and many communities still struggle to find the veterinary care they need.

According to Clemson, between 500 and 1,000 qualified veterinary school applicants nationwide aren't admitted each year because existing programs simply don't have enough capacity. At the same time, South Carolina has its own need for more accessible veterinary services, particularly in communities where recruiting and retaining veterinarians can be difficult.

Clemson's answer is to train more veterinarians at home—and build a program specifically around the needs of the state they'll be learning in.

A Veterinary Campus Built From Scratch

Clemson isn't squeezing its veterinary program into existing classrooms. The university has created a dedicated campus with six academic buildings designed around veterinary education, clinical training, research, and community care.

At the center is the Quattlebaum Hub, which will provide classroom and study space as well as hands-on laboratories. The building will also house a community clinic intended to provide veterinary services to underserved populations, giving students an opportunity to learn while helping address access-to-care challenges.

Other facilities have been designed around the broad range of careers available in veterinary medicine. A dedicated Research Building will support veterinary research, while an Ambulatory Service Building will serve as a base for fourth-year students working with animals on local farms. Separate equine and farm animal teaching facilities will give students space to develop large animal skills.

The result is a campus designed to expose students to veterinary medicine well beyond the traditional small animal examination room.

“We strive to enhance the Clemson community and contribute to animal and human health in South Carolina and beyond,” Stacia Harris, the veterinary program's director of marketing and communications, said.

Clemson Is Rethinking the Traditional Veterinary Teaching Hospital

Perhaps the most interesting part of Clemson's new program is what it isn't building its entire clinical curriculum around: a traditional veterinary teaching hospital.

Instead, Clemson plans to use a partially distributed clinical education model. During their fourth year, students will spend significant portions of their clinical training working in veterinary practices throughout South Carolina rather than completing all of their rotations inside a university-owned hospital.

That puts students directly alongside veterinarians treating patients in the communities where veterinary care is actually being delivered.

“The partially-distributed clinical training model in year 4 will foster interactions with community veterinarians throughout South Carolina and ensure practical and effective hands-on clinical training,” founding dean Dr. Steven Marks told The Tiger.

It's a model that could have implications beyond clinical education. Students rotating through practices across South Carolina will meet veterinarians, clients, practice owners, farmers, and communities throughout the state. Those relationships could ultimately help connect future graduates with places looking to hire veterinarians—and potentially encourage more of them to remain in South Carolina after graduation.

For a state launching its first veterinary school partly to address veterinary workforce needs, where students train may turn out to be nearly as important as what they learn.

Four Years Designed to Build a Veterinarian

Clemson's curriculum is structured to progressively move students from understanding healthy animals to diagnosing disease and ultimately managing real patients.

During the first year, students will focus heavily on professional development and foundational sciences. A healthy-animal course series will introduce anatomy and physiology across domestic species, giving students the foundation they will need before turning their attention toward disease.

Second year moves into a diseased-animal series, where students begin applying subjects including pathology and microbiology to understand what happens when normal physiology goes wrong. By third year, the focus shifts increasingly toward case management, clinical reasoning, and applying medical knowledge in preparation for the clinical experiences that will dominate fourth year.

But Clemson isn't defining veterinary competency entirely through medical knowledge.

Its DVM outcomes model identifies nine areas of competence expected of graduates, including clinical reasoning, communication, collaboration, decision-making, professionalism, professional identity, public health, and financial and practice management.

That last piece is particularly notable at a time when new veterinarians are entering an increasingly complicated profession. Understanding how veterinary businesses function, how medical decisions intersect with finances, and how to communicate effectively with clients and teams can be just as important to career longevity as knowing how to diagnose disease.

Marks said the curriculum will also place an emphasis on Clemson's values and the concept of servant leadership.

Every Student Is Starting With Scholarship Support

The inaugural class is getting another significant boost before the first anatomy exam even begins.

According to Clemson, every member of the Class of 2030 will receive some level of scholarship support as a result of private philanthropy.

That's particularly meaningful in veterinary medicine, where the cost of earning a DVM and the educational debt carried by graduates remain major concerns. Scholarship funding won't eliminate the financial realities of veterinary school, but providing assistance to every member of the inaugural class sends a clear message that affordability is part of the conversation from day one.

It also adds another layer to the investment being made in South Carolina's future veterinary workforce. The state isn't simply creating seats for veterinary students. Clemson and its supporters are attempting to create an environment that attracts students, trains them in communities throughout the state, and gives them reasons to build their careers there afterward.

South Carolina Finally Has a Veterinary School

There will be plenty of firsts for these 80 students over the next four years.

They'll be the first class to learn in Clemson's new veterinary facilities. They'll be the first to move through its curriculum, the first to test its distributed clinical model, and eventually, the first graduates to walk across a Clemson stage and leave with DVM degrees.

There will undoubtedly be growing pains along the way. Starting a veterinary school from scratch is an enormous undertaking, and building a new curriculum, faculty, clinical network, and campus simultaneously is something few universities ever attempt.

But the significance of this fall is already clear.

Until now, aspiring veterinarians from South Carolina had to leave the state to attend veterinary school. Beginning with the Class of 2030, that is no longer true.

And Clemson isn't simply trying to create another veterinary school that looks exactly like the ones that came before it. With community-based clinical training, dedicated large animal facilities, an access-to-care component, business education, and a curriculum designed around the veterinary needs of South Carolina, the university has an opportunity to experiment with what veterinary education can look like for the next generation.

For the 80 students arriving this August, though, the history-making part may feel a little less grand once classes begin.

They're about to discover the same thing every veterinary student eventually learns.

No matter how historic your class is, anatomy still doesn't care.

Source: Reporting by Annie McDonough for The Tiger and information provided by Clemson University. Quotes from Dr. Steven Marks were originally reported by The Tiger.