BBB: Will we see less specialsits?

[D1Bound]

---

Members do not see this ad.

Considering that federal loan options are greatly diminishing, I suspect less people will be able to attend dental school. Even beyond that, I suspect we will see FAR fewer people that are able to pay 200-300k to become an endodontist, periodontist, or prosthodontist. Thoughts?

 

[ortho20255]

1: the numbers of specialists will stay the same. the "quality" of the applicants will decrease, but specialty programs will definitely still fill their positions.

2: The decision to specialize will be less appealing to those who have to take on debt, which is the majority of applicants. The average applicant will initially be those from wealthier familes, so over the next few years those who come from wealthy families will be the majority of applicants.

3: Eventually, as time goes on the average applicant will be a regular dentist who has had time to save longer. It will deter young dentists from buying practices as they will know they eventually want to specialize but need to save up first to pay their school debt. So more dentists in their early career will be available to work for corporations. salaries at corporations will go down as it becomes more competitive.

4: people will still want to specialize to escape general dentistry

tldr: next few years only rich people will specialize, as time goes on numbers will go back to normal but applicants will just be older

 

[somefuturedoc]

For OMFS, I think 4 years will become even more competitive due to the increased loan burden at 6 years for med school

 

[JacquesVallee]

Very difficult to predict the future. However, based on my observations, I just don't see how some of these programs will survive. My ortho friends are often paying 60-80k a year for 3 years on top of their dental school debt. With BBB, I don't see how anyone could pay it. Sure, wealthy people exist. But I do not for a second believe there are enough wealthy applicants to fill every ortho residency program. Realistically, someone's family would be paying 500k for dental school and then 200k for residency. That's absurd. I found this post from a couple years back. GSO had SEVENTEEN unmatched spots as a school who doesn't accept federal loans.

Georgia has 17 spots

Same above goes for perio. I think endo could go relatively unscathed as it's still a lucrative field and only two years so someone could probably convince a bank to give them 100k for residency. Wouldn't be surprised to see some OMFS programs with super expensive med schools go unmatched in the future. I think like only half of OMFR and OMP spots are GME funded but those programs are so small I bet the tuition programs can just fill with international students as they've done in the past.

Peds, DA, 4 year OMFS, and any other GME funded programs will go untouched and probably substantially increase in competitiveness as stated above, many people want to escape general dentistry. A silver lining is this will probably stop any more pay-to-play programs from opening. Ortho is so saturated I think this will actually help the field tremendously if pay-to-play programs shut down, which they should.

All just speculation. Will be very interesting to see what happens this upcoming cycle.