Why Dental School Costs More than Medical School: The Reasons

Previously we ran side-by-side comparisons of dental school and medical school cost of attendance. You may or may not be surprised to learn that dental graduates owe on average $80K more than their medical counterparts. Curiously, both spend 4 years in training not including residency. Let’s look into the reasons why dental school is so much more cost-prohibitive than medical school.

Equipment

The most obvious difference comes down to the fact that the vast majority of dental schools require their students to purchase dental equipment. Just peruse a few school websites and you’ll quickly see the price that schools charge for dental equipment or ‘instrument fees’. These ‘dental kits’ as many schools call them often include items such as handpieces, burs, typodonts, loupes, articulators, and various other instruments . For reference, at my dental school we were each given two lockers plus various cabinets and drawers to store all these boxes of supplies. The plus side is that at some schools, you own these instruments. After graduation, you can sell them or bring them with you to residency or private practice.

Clinic Fees

The second and perhaps more subtle difference boils down to the fees needed to run the dental school clinic itself. This refers to one of the fundamental differences between dental and medical school. That is, dental students are assigned their own patients during their 3rd and 4th year of dental school that they are solely responsible for. In addition, these patients are treated in a dental student clinic. On the other hand, 3rd and 4th year medical students are not assigned their own patients. There exists no medical student clinic. Rather, MS3/4s shadow and learn in post-graduate residency clinics while on various rotations and clerkships

As such, dental schools must be able to fund and run these dental student clinics. This constitutes a huge overhead that medical schools don’t have to worry about as they pass on this burden to their teaching hospitals. For comparison sake, imagine how much slower a medical student would be at doing intake or performing a surgical procedure compared to a resident. Now imagine how much lost income there would be for the hospital/university annually per student if this were the case. This is the financial burden that dental schools must shoulder and why dental schools charge their students expensive clinic fees.

And there you have it. Dental school costs much more than medical school. In fact, private dental schools cost even more than the most expensive business schools.

What did you do with your instruments after finishing dental school? Any cost-saving tips? Comment below!

This is Part II of a two-part series. Click here for Part I.