ADEA has continued to witness a consistent interest in the dental professions during the most recent completed cycles of ADEA’s application services—AADSAS® (dental school), CAAPID® (dental education programs accepting international dentists), DHCAS® (allied dental education programs) and PASS® (advanced dental education programs). ADEA is also continuing its efforts to assist the Canadian dental schools with integrating into ADEA AADSAS. The University of Toronto is participating in ADEA AADSAS for the 2019-20 application cycle and the University of Alberta has committed to participating in the 2020-21 cycle.
In the last ADEA AADSAS cycle, there were 11,500 applicants to dental school. Of these applicants, for the first time, 50% were non-white and/or women. Additionally, in 2018 the application service opened three weeks earlier on May 15 with its first-ever soft launch. The early open allowed applicants to prepare their applications ahead of the official submission date of June 5, and resulted in a higher percentage of applicants completing the application within the first three months of the cycle.
Applications to advanced education programs indicated that applicants were interested in periodontics, prosthodontics and endodontics, corresponding to new CODA standards on implant dentistry in those specialties. ADEA DHCAS saw a 12% increase in applicants, and ADEA CAAPID experienced growth of 10%.
Additionally, the ADEA GoDental® website is more popular than ever, with over 120,000 unique visitors in the last quarter of 2018 (up 9% from the same period in 2017) and tens of thousands more consuming our content via inboxes, newsfeeds and live events. The GoDental social media channels experienced a surge in readership over the year, as has the ADEA GoDental Newsletter, which has over 40,000 subscribers.
The 2018 events targeted to those interested in dentistry experienced record numbers of registrants and attendees:
- The 2018 ADEA GoDental Virtual Fairs for prospective dental students was held over two days—one focusing on learning about ADEA AADSAS and the other providing direct interaction with dental school admissions representatives from 54 U.S. dental schools (four new schools participated for the first time in this event). On the first day, 1,000 attendees logged in and 991 logged in on the second day. In total, including a 30-day archive period after both events, 3,592 individuals registered for the event and 2,057 (57% of registrants) attended.
- With over 870 registrants and 660 attendees, the 2018 ADEA GoDental Recruitment Event was a great success. Of the total attendees, 57% identified as undergraduate college, gap year, post-baccalaureate, high school or community college student. The recruitment fair had 54 exhibitors, including 47 U.S. dental schools and seven dental organizations, including the United States Navy.