This question gets rehashed several times a year, so I didn't really think I'd respond, but I wanted to respond a bit to the humanistic comment.
Although Pacific has a wonderful track record of treating students well and oftentimes better than students at other schools feel they are treated, it's not exactly like being treated as equals. Let's be honest, we're not equals. Every clinical professor on staff, and even much of the didactic professors have at bare minimum, gone through dental school. We are not, as D1s, their equals and they treat us fairly, but not as equals. They do not call you Doctor ______ from the first day...that is only after the white coat ceremony at the start of the 2nd year. They will not simply allow you to move forward because you believe you have done an adequate job (a luxury that if you were their colleague, you could do). They generally have high standards and expect you to conform to those standards even if you'd prefer to just do minimally acceptable work. And, there are a very limited few professors who are not exactly the wonderful humanists you'd expect all the professors to be.
What the humanistic model does mean at our school is that the professors don't cut us down just cause we have an opinion or difference in viewpoint. They listen to us, try to treat us with respect, and try to make our lives, and their own, as fun as possible since we do spend so much time with each other.
I wouldn't come into Pacific hoping for a Utopian dental school, though compared to some perhaps it is. There are other dental schools that also have this level of kindness and respect between professors and students and administrators, so I wouldn't call Pacific unique in this model anymore...though they were probably the first to embrace it.
That's my 2 cents on this topic...we're a good humanistic model, but we're not a perfect humanistic model and I don't think, in a professional school environment, we ever could attain a purely humanistic approach since there are too many personalities and people to ever reign in control over every single person's habits.
