Dental Schools in Arizona

Arizona has 2 dental schools. Below is every one of them with its published DAT academic average, GPA average, and — the number none of them print on the admissions page — what four years there actually costs once the interest that accrues while you are still in class is counted.

If you are a resident, this page is the most important cost decision you will make. Residency is the single largest lever on the price of a dental degree, and it is decided long before your DAT. What your DAT decides is how many of these doors are open.

Every dental school in Arizona

Cost figures are estimates modelled from cost-of-attendance data published circa 2022, assuming the full cost is financed with federal loans and interest accrues in school. With one exception (Michigan) every row in the model is an out-of-state or private figure — so if you are a Arizona resident applying to a public school here, your real number is likely to be meaningfully lower. See the full model and all 64 schools →

The cheapest dental school in Arizona

On the modelled figures, A.T. Still University Arizona School of Dentistry & Oral Health (ATSU-ASDOH) is the lowest four-year cost in Arizona: $649,454 including in-school interest ($509,861 before it), or roughly $759,796 once you project it to today at about 4% a year.

Read that gap carefully. $139,593 of that total is interest — money you never borrowed and never spent, accruing on year-one loans while you sit in year-four clinic. It is the part of the price nobody quotes you, and it is the part that a cheaper seat eliminates outright.

What in-state residency is worth in Arizona

We will not invent a number here. Our model carries exactly one measured in-state row across all 64 schools — the University of Michigan — and there the gap between the in-state and out-of-state price of the identical degree, in the identical building, is $113,721.

That is the honest scale of the residency lever, and it is why the cost column above is a ceiling rather than a quote for Arizona residents at public schools. What it means practically: if you have residency somewhere, a public school in that state is almost always your cheapest path to the same license — and your DAT is what decides whether they take you.

What DAT score do you need for a Arizona dental school?

Published academic averages at Arizona schools run between 19.6 and 20 on the 1–30 scale. The highest of them sits at roughly the 47th percentile of all test takers.

Be careful how you read those numbers: an average is the midpoint of an admitted class. About half of the students admitted scored below it. It is not a cutoff, and clearing it does not mean you are in — committees weigh GPA, experience, interviews and residency alongside it. What a higher score reliably buys you is optionality: more schools whose average you clear, and therefore more chance to choose the cheaper seat instead of taking the only one offered.

Put your own score into the ROI calculator → and see which of these schools open up — and what the next point is worth in dollars.