Thank you for your detailed answer. I really appreciate that.
Here is my thought. It appears that there is no point of going to “an accelerated dental” or “guaranteed dental program” at least for those guaranteed dental programs, which do not give preference to their students in dental school admission such as Temple’s PPHS 7 year dental program.
“An accelerated dental” or “guaranteed dental programs” are as competitive as Ivy if not more. Arguably more competitive because accelerated professional programs such as BS/DDS or BS/MD emphasize more on objective stats particularly standardized scores not EC bs or “holistic” bs.
Paradoxically, students in an accelerated dental can be disadvantageous to their application to dental school because they have to compete amongst extremely competitive pre screened students to achieve high GPA. This would be particularly true for a small school such as UDM or UOP. Those predental students will take almost same classes throughout 3 years. Other students in Ivy league schools can easily achieve high GPA. I know that a lot of private Ivy league schools have rampant GPA inflations. All they have to do is acing DAT, which is only objective judgment test. This means that pre dental students from Ivy league potentially have better chance of getting into dental schools because they may have higher GPA with a bonus prestigious name value of their Ivy school. It does not stop there. If students from UDM or UOP accelerated dental program somehow fail to secure admission to any dental school after 3 years, it can be disastrous because their lesser known name value of its undergraduate. On the other hand, those self directed predental students in Ivy league can get a job easily even if they fail to secure admission to any dental school.
As far as I know UOP admits 200 accelerated dental students. That means that good portion of 135 predental student( you said 65 students successfully got into their dental program) failed to get into any dental school even if some portion of them ended up getting into other dental school.
In order to curve this kind of dilemma, Northwestern’s HPME Program (BS/MD) not only guarantees admission to MD program but also allow exemption of MCAT. Do you have any thought on this?
Why did you choose Temple over other 3 universities on predental?