In your editorial ("Those Who Can, Do," April JADA) you compare an assistant professor’s pay of $65,000 with a specialist’s net of $187,000.
A valid point, but a comparison with public school district pay hurts even more. In our area, a third-grade teacher with 10 years’ experience and a master’s degree makes $65,000—for teaching third graders nine months a year. Why go into dentistry at all if you want to teach?
I believe Michigan is (or was) ranked third in teachers’ pay recently, so Michigan may be something of a bad comparison of public education vs. dental education (but probably not).
I also object to some of the solutions proposed to alleviate the problem of dental educators—specifically, debt forgiveness. Solutions like that distort the marketplace and have unintended consequences. Someone who is attracted to education but who graduated without any debt (perhaps a spouse paid for the education) gets no compensation under that plan because he or she has no debt. Going into debt for an education is an individual decision based on expected return (a business decision). Going into debt should not be done in expectation of loan forgiveness.
The best way to attract people into dental education is simply to pay them more. The pay doesn’t have to approximate private practice, but it does have to reward people for the extra time in school, as well as compensate them to some extent for the "opportunity cost" of foregoing private practice.
