How the Dental Hygienist Shortage Impacts Education and Access

For any institution that trains dental hygienists, the current lie of the land is likely to produce mixed feelings. 

On the one hand, the need for dental hygiene graduates is as urgent as ever. According to 2024 polling from the American Dental Association’s (ADA’s) Health Policy Institute, three in five dentists are worried about the recruitment and retention of staff, with a special emphasis on dental hygienists. And joint reporting from the American Dental Hygienists’ Association (ADHA), the ADA, and other bodies puts these concerns in context, noting that the waves of resignation and retirement brought about by the pandemic are paired with chronic factors that suggest the shortage is more than a flash in the pan. 

Obviously, this is a problem that needs to be addressed: the same report points out that vacant dental hygiene positions contribute to a 10% reduction in dental practice capacity. That means access to dental services is at stake for swathes of the American public.  

From the perspective of an education leader, this is where those mixed feelings come into play. On the surface, a scarcity of hygienists might be seen as good news for institutions: strong demand equals strong enrollments.  

But there’s a second and more challenging side to this coin. As graduate demand rises, cohort size can rise with it. And the shortage won’t be solved by scaling the numbers alone: institutions still need to provide the same high-quality education. How can institutions achieve that at scale, and at a time where educator capacity is already stretched?  

Read on to discover: 

• What’s going on behind the hygienist shortage 

• The pressures faced by educational institutions that need to train hygienists en masse and without sacrificing quality 

• How innovative education models, technologies, and resources can ease that pressure 

What Are the Numbers Behind the Shortage of Dental Hygienists? 

As noted above, three in five dentists are experiencing recruitment problems. And when you look at the federal statistics, that’s no surprise: according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, 61 million Americans live in dental health professional shortage areas, where over 10,000 practitioners are required to stem those shortages (as of August 2025). 

Of course, this is just a single snapshot in time. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) offers a glimpse into the future, anticipating a 7% rise in the employment of dental hygienists between 2024 and 2034. Once you factor in retirements and career changes, the BLS predicts over 15,000 vacancies per year: that’s over 150,000 over the course of the decade. 

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing the sector. If we’re struggling to fill the dental hygienist shortage now, how are we going to manage as new roles and replacement needs stack up over the coming years? 

What’s the Role of Dental Hygienist Education in Addressing the Shortage? 

The often-cited causes of the dental hygienist shortage, from salaries and benefits to burnout, aren't necessarily within the sphere of institutional control. But whatever the reasons may be, the solution falls squarely in the realm of education. 

That’s certainly the view of the ADHA, which released a position statement in 2024 that proposed:  

‘Supporting and advising on the creation of additional entry level dental hygiene programs and on the increase in capacity of current entry-level dental hygiene programs, where appropriate.’ 

And, in fact, that’s exactly what institutions are looking to do: an ADEA survey of allied dental program directors published in 2025 found that 53% of allied dental programs plan to increase enrollment. But that same survey also unearthed the immediate difficulties involved in that approach: high faculty turnover, unfilled positions, and overworked educators are much in evidence, which will clearly make increased cohort sizes a difficult prospect. 

The question for dental hygiene programs, then, rests on that crucial piece of reconciliation. Clearly, larger cohort sizes are needed. But how do you ensure those cohorts are receiving quality education, particularly when faculty are already working beyond expectations and in tricky settings? 

MORE ON THE CHANGING STATE OF HEALTHCARE EDUCATION | ‘How Education 4.0 is Transforming Healthcare Learning’ 

Keeping Quality at the Heart of Hygiene Education: 2 Key Criteria 

When cohorts grow and educator capacity remains limited, the stage is set for learning technology to fill that gap. But given the range of factors at play here, the tools and resources dental hygiene programs use will need to demonstrate: 

• Learning efficacy, to ensure dental hygiene students receive the quality of education needed to flourish in their field 

• Capacity for scaling, to ensure those benefits can be felt program-wide even as student numbers increase and educators manage larger cohorts  

Let’s break down each one in turn. 

1) Dental Hygiene Learning Platforms That Work 

As with any form healthcare education, the core aim of dental hygiene programs is to produce practice-ready graduates.  

That means ensuring students can conform to the ADHA’s Standards For Clinical Dental Hygiene Practice, which (in its 2025 edition) emphasizes clinical decision-making as a key factor in treatment planning. 

In that light, maintaining quality education for dental hygienists means prioritizing platforms that can meaningfully support the clinical, hands-on, and decision-focused skills that new graduates will be relying on. Simulation-based learning is a natural fit here, given its ability to mimic the scenarios learners will encounter in repeatable ways. 

It’s also a natural fit in that it’s effective. One study published in the Journal of Dental Hygiene found that the use of simulation technology made a statistically significant improvement to the identification and recording of dental restorations when compared to traditional methods. 

GET THE LOWDOWN ON SIMULATION’S EFFICACY | ‘Does Digital Simulation-Based Learning Actually Work? What the Evidence Says For Healthcare Education’ 

2) Dental Hygiene Learning Platforms That Scale 

It’s worth noting that the simulation technology used in the study above was an A-Dec 42L Stationary Simulator: a large, workstation-style device that students wouldn’t be able to use while, for example, they’re on the bus. 

And that brings us to the second criterion schools need to consider: the volume of students at hand. Simulation-based learning may be the best means of preserving quality for hands-on programs, but a reliance on cumbersome equipment or space-limited simulation labs is only going to magnify the limitations schools already have. 

As such, any institutions looking to support and magnify their educators’ teaching efforts in the face of an influx of students need to ask themselves: 

• Is this learning platform portable?  

• Can the platform run on the smartphones and tablets students already own? 

• Is its learning content aligned to our existing curriculum, ensuring educators don’t need to spend time and energy reshaping their approaches? 

• Does the platform support cohort-wide and individual analytics, allowing educators to keep up with student progress even as classroom sizes grow? 

These questions sit at the core of the institutional response to dental hygienist shortages. With a platform that ticks these boxes, institutions will be equipped to enact the ADHA’s recommendations for stopping the shortage without compromising learning quality or efficacy, and work toward improving that all-important access to dental healthcare that millions of Americans need. 

SEE PORTABLE DENTAL SIMULATION IN ACTION | ‘Simulation Spotlight: A Dental Charting and Examination Procedures Q&A’ | ‘Simulation Spotlight: Local Anesthetic in Dental Education Q&A’ 

Frequently Asked Questions on the Dental Hygiene Shortage 

Ready to Scale Your Dental Hygiene Program? 

Immersify’s mobile-first, simulation-based learning platform helps educators keep track of student progress through deep analytics and insight, allowing educators to effortlessly augment their curricula even when class sizes grow. 

Book a demo today to see the platform in action, and join us as we work to address the dental hygienist shortage through compromise-free education.