If you pursue a doctor's degree in dentistry, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #7 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 56 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for dentistry students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 6,928 doctor's degrees in dentistry to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Dentistry School for Your Doctor's Degree
The dentistry doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality dentistry program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on dentistry students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other dentistry students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for dentistry to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized dentistry related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for dentistry students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Dentistry Doctor's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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ADBLOCK #171
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Dentistry in the United States
Learn about the top ranked colleges and universities for dentistry students seeking a a doctor's degree. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
It's difficult to beat University of Pennsylvania if you want to pursue a doctor's degree in dentistry. Located in the large city of Philadelphia, UPenn is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Doctorate students who receive their degree from the dentistry program make around $80,541 in their early career salary.
Located in the city of Henderson, Roseman University of Health Sciences is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Doctorate recipients from the dentistry degree program at Roseman University of Health Sciences earn $2,584 more than the average graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
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Additional Noteworthy Schools
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Dentistry Doctor's Degree Schools award.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
The dentistry doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality dentistry program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
