My friend and I were having a discussion about which of the two is harder to get into. I said that both were relatively similar, except dental school might be ever so slightly harder to get into than DO schools due to the slightly higher GPA and because there are fewer dental schools than DO schools, but my friend claims that DO schools were a lot harder to get into. Who was right?
As you can tell from my username, I might have some bias, which is why I posted here, because if I posted in the dental forums, they would just confirm my biases, so yeah, I'm not trying to troll.
I think at this point in time, there are actually more dental schools in the US than there are osteopathic medical schools. The last statistic I saw said that there are about 57 dental schools in the US, whereas there are 28 osteopathic medical schools (
1,
2). However, there are more
medical schools in general, when you include both MD and DO granting institutions, than dental schools, and furthermore, plenty of folks applying to medical school will apply to both MD and DO granting institutions.
The question is how do we assess how "hard" it is to get into either school? I think it is sufficient to say that both are types of professional schools are difficult to gain entrance into, unless we come up with some agreeable criteria to measure the difficulty, since there is much more involved than just admissions statistics. Indeed, the entrance exams are different between the two types of schools, so it is difficult to compare in that regard. However, if you look at mean GPA values, dental student enrollees do tend to the higher averages [(
DO, 2006: Sci, 3.36; Non-Sci, 3.55; Mean, 3.45) and (
Dental, 2007: Sci, 3.46; Mean, 3.53)]. This is, however, based on the 2006 data for DO. I expect the 2007 averages to be higher, as this tends to be the trend.
Anyway, as I stated previously, GPA averages aren't sufficient, in my opinion, to delineate difficulty in gaining admissions. You need more and better criteria than that. It's a foolhardy argument at best. Who cares? Go for the profession that fits you best.