Actually dental school admissions is relatively easy compared to some other professional schools. usually there's a trickle down effect from medical school. In years where medical school is extremely competitive many strong candidates don't get in and they tend to go into dentistry and pharmacy. Thus right now it should be a little easier to get into dental school as not as many people are applying to medical school, thus there's less of a trickle down effect. Also remember that many students when applying to professional schools tend to apply to 10 to 25 different programs but can actually physically only go to one program(ie they can't attend 25 programs but when the schools he applied to count the number of applicants received he will be counted by 24other schools from the one he's attending, as being an applicant, thus greatly distorting the number of people accepted to the number of people applying ratio.)generally speaking the number of total people applying (not number of applications because as already mentioned one person often sends out like 20 applications) to the total number of spots in all dental schools is usually 1.3 - 1.6 to 1. probably when the economy is good there aren't as many people going into medical school, pharmacy school the ratio is probably closer to 1.3 and when the economy is bad and it's tough to get into other graduate schools it's closer to 1.6. Anyways just work hard and don't give up and you'll get in somwhere. try to maintain your gpa at 3.1 to 3.4 and do your best on the dat and things will work out.(ps don't worry to much about number of apps and other statistics or it will drive you nuts, usually there is no model for how people get into professional schools, ie people get in for dumb reasons and they get rejected for even dumber reasons). hope this helped
