We may very well have fewer medical students. If, in fact, it is, then in 25 years, we will have a significantly smaller medical school class. Park does not anticipate an increase in the number of dental students either. We are not likely to increase our student body. According to Park, dental school student fees are only one-third as much as typical medical school fees.
Medical schools are also able to generate money from doctors who practice while they instruct.
But dental school instructors do not have time to practice while teaching because of the close attention they must pay to individual students. Dental school students also require more faculty supervision because their training includes a greater amount of learning through treating patients, he said. The number of students is not likely to change greatly, but what they are taught and how they are taught certainly will. Levey believes that medical students of the future will have to treat an increasingly older population of patients. We are a rapidly aging population and will probably have a doubling of those in our population who are over the age of 75 in the next 25 years.