In recent years, cooperation and integration among universities have been promoted and conducted through establishment of an integrative system, supported by the nation. This paper examines the approach to inter-university collaboration in veterinary training and clarifies the process leading to collaboration.
Findings are as follows: 1) Although the number of veterinary training programs increased during the 1960s and 1970s, they did not increase further until 2018. 2) The first improvement in veterinary education was to change the working period from 4 to 6 years, but this took about 35 years to achieve. 3) With veterinarians’ advancement and internationalization, training high-quality veterinarians as traditional small veterinarians has become impossible. An improvement measure aimed to reorganize and integrate universities but that goal was not achieved. 4) Absent integration, collaboration and cooperation were chosen as alternatives for improving educational quality. However, the difficulty of cooperation was again confirmed because it is currently limited to only some universities.
While these findings reaffirm cooperation’s difficulty, sharing a perception of crisis has been shown to promote cooperation.