Vedder, an expert in the economics of higher education, laughs at the excuses he says educators use to mask "highly inefficient operations." He counters that companies are burdened by the same rising health care and utility expenses but have not increased consumer prices in line with higher education.

"The deans always find someone to blame it on other than themselves," he says. "The truth is they are not lying awake at night wondering about the student-debt burden. They're worrying about raising their program's rankings, building new buildings and hiring professors. That, to me, is the underlying problem at work here."

Bloated faculty numbers, accreditation standards that require expensive specialist professors and tuition-funded research initiatives aggravate the problem, Vedder adds.

Faced with such an outcome, Boosinger, who runs one of the cheapest veterinary medical programs in the country, says the colleges' leaders are doing what they can.

"You can ague that we're not doing much, but we're taking steps to address this," he says.

Taking off the blinders

For Mike Nolan, a third-year DVM-PhD student at Virginia Tech, a fix isn't coming fast enough. The 24-year-old insists he and his classmates do not live an extravagant lifestyle. Still, he is determined to bypass the $55,000-a-year jobs in general practice for a career in industrial pathology or academia. The reason: He wants to be able to pay off the $200,000 in loans he's accrued during his education.

"I figure I'll need around $1,800 a month and a bare-bones minimum annual salary of $85,000, and that's undershooting it quite a bit," he says. "The high cost of veterinary education has pushed me to think about specializing. It's why I'm looking to go into pathology, where starting salaries are over six figures. When I'm done, I'll probably be a quarter of a million dollars in debt."

Wilson says most students aren't as savvy about what they owe, preferring to ignore the burden despite the rash of colleges requiring them to create budgets to assess their living expenses after graduation.

Still, knowing it on paper and being confronted with the reality are two different things, Rossi says.

"I think one of the big sociological issues is that space in vet school programs is still so limited, and there's such fierce competition, that students have blinders on," he says. "You're just so happy to be in school, you don't think about the money you're going to owe compared to what you'll be paid. The schools play up to that with the 'you're so lucky to be here' attitude. Students are the main source of funding, and that environment is not conducive to lowering the cost of veterinary education."