Salary isn't margin, it's cost. You have to pay the market rate to convince your dentist to be a dentist instead of a psychiatrist or lawyer or bank manager.
What are you proposing, price controls? Then what do you do when your dentist quits to become a real estate broker?
That would certainly make more sense than any kind of public dentistry service, though it's not clear there is a lot of room for improvement there. What makes becoming a dentist hard is, basically, medical school. It's possible there is some low hanging fruit there, but a lot of that hardness is intrinsic.
Of course having standards is good for patient outcomes. That said, I bet lots and lots (and lots and lots) of the rejected applicants would be fine dentists.
> Of course having standards is good for patient outcomes. That said, I bet lots and lots (and lots and lots) of the rejected applicants would be fine dentists.
Would you bet your root canal on it?
The fact that there are more people who would like to do something than there are people who are capable of meeting
the performance qualifications for it isn't an inherent problem. Only 0.6% of Navy recruits end up becoming SEALs despite 50% of recruits expressing interest. I'm sure there are many, many Navy sailors who would be fine SEALs, but that's neither here nor there.
Unless you're referencing specific evidence that the qualifications are systematically too strict[0], then it doesn't mean much to say that there are rejected applicants who would be fine dentists. And to be blunt, I think it'd be easier to make the case that they're not strict enough.
[0] The working hours and revenue of dentistry practices are not evidence of this
If the marginal applicants rejected from dental school wouldn't make good dentists, then sure, it's likely the case that the marginal graduates aren't good dentists.
It's not really the case that we learn anything about the capabilities of applicants from the rejection, the number of people admitted to dental schools isn't adjusted to account for particularly good or particularly bad applicant classes.
What are you proposing, price controls? Then what do you do when your dentist quits to become a real estate broker?