New University!

[Austin Eddy]

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I have an interesting situation that I would like some opinions on! I currently attend Southern Utah University which is a really great school! It has been around for a while and has a high percentage of acceptance rates for dental and medical school. The problem is that tuition is high and since the enrollment will be down (due to the LDS mission age change) it will most likely go up! Down the road the state college just got credited to become a university. I was wondering how dental schools would rate new universities and since tuition will be a lot less at the new college would it be worth it to transfer? Thanks for any input! 👍

 

[ewu6three]

Get good grades. What University you attend makes ZERO difference. I am sure of this, people might tell you otherwise, but they are wrong.

 

[UCSFx2017]

Here's the thing, dental schools with applicants from their undergrad understand the difficulty of courses, professors, programs/majors, and available opportunities from their home institution. UCLA DS with UCLA undergrad and VCU DS with VCU undergrad.

The other thing to mention is the consistency of having accepted, enrolled, and performed students who graduated from particular undergraduate schools. For example, UCSF consistently receives students from UCSD and UCLA. By comparing the performance of these new applicants with previous applicants from the same undergrad, they can gauge and predict their most likely performance at UCSF. I would guess they would be more inclined to accept a student from a university that has a history with UCSF than a student from a university that they never had experience with, all other competitiveness being the same between the applicants.

By attending a new school expect no such relationships to exist but that's okay so long as you shine through your DAT. EC/research/scholarship/fellowships/etc help you stand out.

 

[UCSFx2017]

Get good grades. What University you attend makes ZERO difference. I am sure of this, people might tell you otherwise, but they are wrong.

I go to a no-name university and got into all the schools that were within my reach and that I wanted to go to.

 

[UCSFx2017]

"Less frequently used criteria have included the academic rigor of the college attended..."

"...we have observed that some dental students having academic difficulty had college backgrounds that included a light academic load and often attended less academically rigorous colleges."

"Admissions data collected included science grade point average (SGPA), overall grade point average (GPA), two sub-scores of the DAT (the academic average, AA, and the Perceptual Ability Test, PAT), the ranking of the college attended, and the college academic load."

"College rankings are listed on a scale from 60 to 100."

"When a college does not submit profile information to the Princeton Review, the scores are automatically listed as a 60."

http://www.jdentaled.org/content/71/10/1314.long

 

[Schwanz]

Nice job at cherry picking those quotes, I can do the same:

"The academic load while in college was not found to help predict first-year GPA or graduating GPA."

"Admissions criteria were generally weak predictors of first-year and graduating GPA."

"Our regression models provided mixed findings for the predictive power and lack thereof among admissions variables and first-year and fourth-year dental school GPAs."

"Our findings of generally weak correlations between admissions criteria and first-year GPA and GPA at graduation were consistent with other investigators who have compared average and underperforming dental students."

It seemed like the main conclusion of the study, and opening sentence of the discussion was that

"Our primary finding was that first-year dental school GPA was a statistically significant predictor for continued success in dental school performance as measured by GPA at graduation for both normally tracking and underachieving students."

The best advice I've been given, and which has worked for me, is that it doesn't matter what undergrad you attend, it only matters how you perform in your course work.

"Less frequently used criteria have included the academic rigor of the college attended..."

"...we have observed that some dental students having academic difficulty had college backgrounds that included a light academic load and often attended less academically rigorous colleges."

"Admissions data collected included science grade point average (SGPA), overall grade point average (GPA), two sub-scores of the DAT (the academic average, AA, and the Perceptual Ability Test, PAT), the ranking of the college attended, and the college academic load."

"College rankings are listed on a scale from 60 to 100."

"When a college does not submit profile information to the Princeton Review, the scores are automatically listed as a 60."

http://www.jdentaled.org/content/71/10/1314.long

 

[dmdluffy]

Get good grades, it makes the most difference. Nobody cares where you went to ugrad with the exception of some schools and community college.

 

[UCSFx2017]

Nice job at cherry picking those quotes, I can do the same:

"The academic load while in college was not found to help predict first-year GPA or graduating GPA."

Academic load does not equal ranking of college attended.

"Admissions criteria were generally weak predictors of first-year and graduating GPA."

Graduating GPA includes 3rd and 4th year clinical grades. Their use of the word admission criteria encompassed only GPAs, DAT, courseload, and rigor of college attended. Obviously you would expect GPAs, DAT, courseload, and rigor of college attended to have little correlation for 3rd and 4th year clinical grades (dependent on hand skills). So if the admissions criteria was limited to only predicting the first and second year didactic, why would you expect it to predict your graduation GPA which includes 3rd and 4th year clinical grades?

"Our regression models provided mixed findings for the predictive power and lack thereof among admissions variables and first-year and fourth-year dental school GPAs."

"Our findings of generally weak correlations between admissions criteria and first-year GPA and GPA at graduation were consistent with other investigators who have compared average and underperforming dental students."

Read the sentence immediately following your quoted material.

"We found that SGPA, AA, and the academic rating of the school were significantly correlated to first-year GPA in normally tracking students, while only overall college GPA was significantly correlated to first-year GPA in underachieving dental students."

I agree with you that your GPA, particularly sGPA, is far more important than the supposed academic rigor/ranking of your school. You don't need statistics to show this. However, ranking (supposed rigor) of your undergrad still matters and plays a role as a significant predictor of 1st year success. Attending a brand new school is too risky for me but if I were given the chance to do this all over again, I would choose my affordable but established state school every single time. If I were the OP, I would have a tough decision.

 

[kcumb12]

I wondered the same thing. I went to UVU right after it became a university and I received several offers to dental school. I did research for SUU, loved it down there. Dixie will be just fine if you feel the need to transfer, I just cant imagine it being that much cheaper to constitute a transfer.