Go to the school where you feel most comfortable with the people, location, & institution.
Relative to the total cost of dental school $7,000 per year extra is not a lot. I guarantee that if you choose to go to a school based on money alone, and you end up not liking that school as much as you think that you would have liked the other school, you will regret it. Dental school is difficult and you need to be as comfortable as you can be with the school you will be at.
With that being said, OU is a good dental school. We definitely have certain strengths and certain weaknesses.
I think that OU is strongly focused on students. Most of the faculty at OU are there to because they want to be educators. While we do have several faculty involved in research, they are good educators as well as researchers. The administration is very receptive of students and our ideas. The dean meets with all the class presidents and with focus groups from each class on a regular basis, and when possible and appropriate suggestions from these meetings are actually implemented.
The most commonly touted strength of OU is our clinical program. We have high clinical requirements, and we do a lot of clinical work. We have no endo or pedo specialty programs and get a lot of experience in these areas. Additionally we get a lot of experience in most of the other fields of dentistry as well.
At OU there is ample opportunity to do research as a pre-doctoral student. We have two summers off, and our alumni organization sponsor research grants for pre-doctoral students. They also pay for students to travel to the IADR symposium to present their research. Most all students who want to do research are able
Our school is part of a comprehensive health sciences center. This is good because it gives us the opportunity to get to know and to work with other health professions students. It also increases the opportunity to be involved in extracurricular organization and in campus leadership. However one drawback is that our scientific education is combined with the other health science programs, and it is not always tailored to dentally relevant topics. We learn what we need to (most students pass boards), but sometimes we have to wade through more extraneous information than students at other school might.
Finally, I will end with what I started: go wherever you feel the best about.
