Bulletin of Dental Education Article

A new ADEA report highlights emerging challenges and shifts in the U.S. dental school faculty workforce between fiscal years (FY) 2019 and 2025. The report, ADEA Faculty Trends: Full-time and Part-time Faculty Positions at U.S. Dental Schools, FY 2019 and FY 2025, examines trends in faculty composition as well as open and lost positions across U.S. dental schools, offering insight into faculty workforce planning, recruitment and retention strategies for deans, academic leaders and faculty members.

ADEA members can access the report at adea.org/facultytrends and review the data in the ADEA Data Portal at dataportal.adea.org.

The report draws on national faculty data collected from U.S. dental schools through the ADEA Dental School Faculty Salary and Demographic Census (ADEA Faculty Census), which captured an estimated 92% of faculty nationwide in FY19 and 85% in FY25.

Key findings from the report include the following trends between FY19 and FY25:

• Full-time faculty share increased from 49% to 53%, with assistant professor positions contributing roughly one-third of this growth.
• Tenure-based roles, on tenure track and tenured, declined from 19% to 16%, driven by an increase in the number of faculty at schools without a tenure system and reductions in tenured and tenure-track positions.
• The number of open positions was still much higher in FY25 (522) than before the COVID pandemic (383), with more than half being assistant professor openings.
• Limited response to position announcements became the leading hiring barrier in FY25, replacing concerns about candidate qualifications, as was the case six years prior.

In addition to the national report, ADEA members can access free of charge the aggregate data on the FY25 U.S. dental school faculty positions in the ADEA Data Portal through the following dashboards:

• U.S. Dental Schools: FT and PT Faculty – Benchmarks
  • Open to all ADEA members.
• U.S. Dental Schools: FT and PT Faculty – Your School
  • Restricted access to ADEA members. If you would like access to the faculty data for your school, please request access through the data portal.

For questions or comments about this report, contact Shiyao Liu, Ph.D., ADEA Senior Director of Higher Education Research, at lius@adea.org.

Published on May 13, 2026