One afternoon in January, Dr. Kathleen Yvorchuk was teaching a course called Introduction to Physical Exam. That day’s lesson was the correct way to check a horse for a sinus infection. The trick is to knock on the bone that runs above a horse’s muzzle — knock hard, like that bone is a door — and then listen.

“If they have a mass in their sinuses, it will sound dense and it thuds,” Dr. Yvorchuk told a handful of students. A horse named Chocolate stood by, awaiting knocks. “Please recognize, this is a large animal and you’re not going to hurt it.”

The students took turns knocking on the forehead of Chocolate, who seemed impervious, as well as sinus-infection-free.

Students spend seven semesters at Ross, one after another, without summer breaks. This allows them to get through the program in less time, but to critics, Ross is a bit like a factory that is constantly building up production. This same criticism has also, in a milder form, been leveled at many of the 28 vet schools in the United States.

There are roughly 91,000 working vets in the country, about one-tenth the number of M.D.’s. But this relatively small universe is expanding rapidly. State budget cuts have led many domestic schools to make up lost revenue by adding students, in some cases by 10 percent in one year. Four more vet schools, both public and private, are either in the planning phases or under construction, one in New York, two in Arizona and one in Tennessee. If all are ultimately built, there will be thousands of additional D.V.M.’s on the market in coming years.

At the same time, the veterinary medical association’s Council on Education has picked up the pace of its accreditation of foreign schools, like Ross on St. Kitts, giving its imprimatur to 10 of them since 2000. The goal, says Dr. Aspros, the association’s president, is to make the United States the global standard setter for veterinary medicine. He defends this practice by noting that you don’t need a diploma from a school accredited by the association to practice in the United States; graduates from unaccredited schools simply have to jump through a few additional hoops. But the association’s seal of approval means students can qualify for certain federal loans. Because tuition at foreign schools is not subsidized by any states, graduates from places like Ross tend to wind up with larger-than-average debts.

And the level of debt for American graduates, says Dr. Alan M. Kelly, former dean of the veterinary school at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study on work force needs, is already too high. “The general guideline is that your debt should never be twice your starting salary,” Dr. Kelly says. “The debt of graduates today, on average, is three times their starting salary. Well, this is a cataclysm.”