applicant said:
Is admission to dental school getting competitive significantly as people say, year by year?
How many applicants applied to dental school in the recent 3 years?
Do you guys see that admission to dental school will be as hard as getting in medical school (academically) in the near future?
Sheer numbers and rudimentry math tell us that that the odds of getting into dental school are less than those of getting into medical school.
In 2005, 37,374 applied to medical school and of those 17,978 were accepted, so approximatly 48% of those who applied were accepted.(
http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2005/2005summary.htm).
However for dental school in 2005, about~11,000 applied for about 4000 spots. I tried to find concrete numbers via the internet, but couldn't get anything but a journal article pointing out the trends:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16141096&dopt=Abstract . Doing the math, about 36% of those who apply to dental school will be accepted. Of course this is based upon estimated data for the 2005 entering class, however, if we were to estimate the numbers of applicants for 2006, chances are, the numbers of applicants are similar if not greater. Thus we conclude that the number of applicants who apply to those actually accepted to dental school are less than those of medical school.
Of course we have to understand that from year to year the numbers always change, but it seems dentistry is very competitive (and the trend shows increasing applicants for so few spots) and more so than medical school, viewing it from a statistical standpoint of taking a random sample from the population.
There are those who will say we must account for the test scores, gpas and other variables and to do so, would take an in depth analysis.
Hopefully this helps. L8r!
