Today’s N&O has a story on the proposed East Carolina dental school that is edging into advocacy journalism. The piece makes it seem as if the opposition to building a new dental school stems only from greedy dentists who don’t want more competition and don’t care if poor people in the rural east don’t have dentists.
Facts: it doesn’t matter where dentists are trained (many who learn dentistry in other states come to NC to set up practice) and wherever they’re trained, they will go where there is a good living to be made. If you think that just because someone graduates from a dental school located in Greenville he is going to want to locate in some little town in the east to take care of the residents, you’re badly mistaken.
There is a national market for dentists. If we build a second dental school in the state (there is one at UNC-CH already), that will probably have virtually no impact on the number of dentists per thousand people, which is determined by the economics of the profession, not the place where the dentists were educated. This is another of those instances where people think political boundaries matter, but don’t.
