U.S. dental school applicants and enrollees: a ten year perspective.

Applications to dental schools increased throughout the 1990s until 1997. In 1998 this pattern reversed, and the number of dental school applicants has dropped each year since that time and continues to decline through the application cycle for the 2001-2002 first-year class. Possible reasons for the decline in applications include an abundance of financially rewarding career opportunities fueled by the robust U.S. economy, a reluctance by college students to assume more educational debt, an unfavorable view of healthcare careers in the light of managed care and declining federal reimbursement, and assumptions about the difficulty of gaining admittance to dental school given the high academic achievement of those who have been admitted in recent years. A national decline in the applicant pool does not necessarily translate into a decline for any given dental school. The quality of applicants, judged by grade point averages and Dental Admissions Test scores, is high. Nevertheless, the recent drop in dental school applicants is a cause for concern. Because recruitment must be approached as a process that takes years to yield results, stakeholders in dental education need to sustain vigorous recruiting efforts even in the best of times.