If you pursue a doctor's degree in veterinary medicine, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #9 most popular program in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for veterinary medicine students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 583 doctor's degrees in veterinary medicine to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Veterinary Medicine School for Your Doctor's Degree
The veterinary medicine doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to veterinary medicine students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of veterinary medicine students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for veterinary medicine to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized veterinary medicine related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for veterinary medicine students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Veterinary Medicine Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in veterinary medicine needs to take a look at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Located in the city of Champaign, UIUC is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Doctorate graduates who receive their degree from the veterinary medicine program earn an average of $96,557 in their early career salary.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.