Midwestern University plans to open a dental college in Downers Grove, IL, according to a Chicago Tribune report.
Advocates say the school clinic could help meet the needs of underserved patients in rural and poor areas.
The school would open fall of 2011 if all goes according to plan, said Dennis Paulson, the vice president for dental and medical education at Midwestern, the Tribune reported.
The university must first secure approval from the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the Commission on Dental Accreditation, according to the report. It said the school would admit 125 students.
Dental schools were closed at Loyola University in 1993 and Northwestern University in 2001, leaving only two programs in the state, at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE).
Illinois had maintained a constant 8,000 dentists for much of the last three decades, but more are nearing retirement age, according to the Tribune. While the state only graduates about 125 students annually, so many students come from out of state that it issues about 300 dental licenses per year.
SIUE had 678 applications for 50 seats in its most recently admitted class, a school official said, and roughly 1,600 people applied for the 64 seats in UIC's fall 2007 class, so Midwestern's administrators are expecting their program to be popular, according to the Tribune.
Midwestern opened a second campus in Arizona 14 years ago and built a new dental school there in 2008. Its first class of 110 students began studies last fall.
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