How do you feel about the level of debt dental students take on?

Financial realism. Committees worry about students who haven't confronted the number.

Written by Victoria Young, DDS · NYU College of Dentistry '24 · Penn Dental Medicine

The trap

'I haven't really thought about it' or 'I'll figure it out.' Both alarm the people who watch students struggle with this every year. Knowing the number is the answer.

How to structure your answer

State that you know the actual figures → your honest assessment → your plan → why it's still worth it to you.

Know real numbers — average dental school debt commonly runs well into six figures, higher at private schools
Don't minimize it or pretend it's fine
Have a plan: repayment strategy, practice type, loan repayment programs, living costs
Be honest that it constrains early career choices

A weak answer

What most people say

It's a lot, and I won't pretend it isn't intimidating when I think about it. But I've made my peace with it — it's an investment in a career I'll have for forty years, and dentistry is a stable profession with real earning potential. I'd rather carry the debt doing something I love than avoid it and end up somewhere I don't want to be.

Reassurance without a number; they can't tell whether he's actually looked.

A stronger answer

What lands

I've built the number. I did the books for my parents' food truck starting at fifteen, so I made a spreadsheet — each school's published cost of attendance, four years, plus interest accruing while I'm still in class. For the private programs on my list it clears three hundred thousand before I've earned a dollar. That's not fine. It means I'm not opening my own practice at thirty. I'm looking hard at service-linked repayment, since I'd want to work in an underserved county anyway. What settled it was running the same spreadsheet on the job I'd keep instead. The forty-year version of that one was worse.

Real arithmetic, a constraint named out loud, and a plan attached to it.

One of them says the number is scary. The other says the number, and what it costs him at thirty.

These are illustrations, not scripts. An answer you memorize sounds memorized — the point is the shape and the specificity, in your own words and about your own life.

Reading it isn't the same as saying it.

Most people can explain a good answer and still fall apart saying one out loud. Admitted asks you all 100 questions in a faculty voice, records you, and scores your pace and filler words.

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