hmmm could you elaborate on this?
Reminder: There are no formal, holistic ranking of dental school. In fact, there currently cannot be a valid ranking because the data provided by the ADA is often outdated and incomplete by the lack of participation of some dental schools.
One cannot help but question both the criteria involved in these informal rankings and the purpose these rankings serve. Is the purpose to assist applicants in choosing the dental school that is right for them? If so, they fail miserably. The existence of a single dental school ranking, assembled according to one person's unique values, cannot be useful to someone else with his/her own unique value system. A single ranking cannot appropriately distribute unique weights to each factor within the ranking formula and then be generalized to the entire applicant pool. It is quite intuitive that the ranking of the best music or best food by one person cannot be generalized to all. Why then is the exception made to ranking dental schools? In fact, these rankings are most likely accountable to more harm than good by swaying the easily impressionable into financial turmoil or poor dental school experience due to a biased school selection made already for them by a stranger who is uninvested and unaware of the swayed's life.
I will assume that those responsible for the rankings relied on the self-reported surveys by the ADA when making their rankings. The ranking of dental schools by instructional hours can be found in "Volume 4":
http://www.ada.org/1621.aspx
Obviously, the hours indicate quantity which do not necessarily indicate equal quality. Additional instructional hours may not necessary indicate a better education especially if the curriculum is inefficiently redundant. The number of additional hours that are necessary to produce a noticeable difference in graduate preparedness is anyone's guess, especially with preparedness being largely dependent on the student. The length of the academic year also varies with each school, further lessening the value of the ADA's ordering by total or weekly average instructional hours.
The same could be said for "Faculty to Student Ratio". See "Table 8" of "Volume 3" in the above link. Some schools did not participate in the ordering and the information is unfortunately outdated.
I will further assume that the ranking relied on NIDCR's research ranking. The ordering of NIDCR funding can be found here:
http://www.nidcr.nih.gov/GrantsAndF...talSchools/GrantstoDentalInstitutions2012.htm
The total funding ($143 million) involved in NIDCR ranking accounts for only 28% of NIH funding allotted specifically to Dental/Oral and Craniofacial Disease. That 28% from the NIDCR and the remaining 72% of total Dental/Oral and Craniofacial Disease funding (approx. $500 million) only accounts for less than 2% of NIH total funding. The ranking also does not account for other public and private sources of funding for dental school research. If the ranking's source relied on NIDCR research funding for determine dental school research weight in their ranking formula, the ranking is relying on incomplete data and is mostly likely invalid.
Because there are (1) different models of dental schools, some heavily focusing on instruction, research, or having some balance between the two, (2) no
complete data of student-to-faculty ratio provided by the ADA, (3) varying degrees of both redundancy in curriculum and lengths in academic year which skew total instructional hours ranking, and (3) students who have different selection factors when choosing a dental school, no ranking can seriously rank dental schools into a single list.
Please leave the ranking to each applicant, who must ultimately research and choose the school for him- or herself. Any other ranking made by another person, who is neither financially- nor emotionally-invested in the applicant's life, is unnecssary and sometimes harmful.
