Do you know what you’re getting into?

The profession you are about to enter is hard – it’s physically and emotionally demanding. Very few of the people that you call customers will enjoy seeing you during the workday. You often have the obligation to comfort patients who are experiencing moderate to severe discomfort without the benefit of sedation. The perceived value of a healthy dentition is significantly less than we like to believe, and the average compensation of the general dentist is finally stagnant after a almost decade long decline beginning in 2007.

I’m writing this because there is a new dental school opening in El Paso, Texas and this video of Anthony Bourdain opining on culinary school strikes a chord.

A handful of new dental schools have opened in the last decade. These news schools are interesting and probably cash flow machines. A class of 100 would provide a guaranteed cash flow of more than 6.5M if tuition was 65k per year. Four years in they are looking at 26M per year in tuition alone. Couple that with campus housing, bookstore, supplies, patient care and all the other things associated with these facilities, and they are legitimate money makers for an institution. A strong argument can be made that there is no need for an additional dental school; especially a school in Texas. The shortage of dentists in West Texas is not due to a lack of a dental school. Likewise ,the shortage of dentists in small towns across the US is not due to a nation-wide shortage of dentists.

If we need more dentists to practice in West Texas, dental schools need to accept more students from West Texas who show an interest in returning home to practice. Dentists do not necessarily live and practice in urban environments because these environments are more economical or appealing; we practice in these environments because it is where we are from.

Here’s a solution for West Texas. For the new dental school in El Paso, half the class should be from El Paso and the other half of the class should be from other towns in West Texas (the smaller the town, the more appealing the applicant). In 6-8 years, there will be more than enough dentist to support the West half of the state.