Long Wait for a Dental Appointment? Wisconsin Tech Colleges are Working to fix That

A $20 million boost from the Legislature is expanding oral health training programs, aiming to ease a dental worker shortage.

By Miranda Dunlap
Wisconsin Watch

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. It was made possible by donors like you.

It took Allison Beining and Kaitlyn Weyenberg almost three years to get accepted into Fox Valley Technical College’s dental hygiene program. While they inched up the waiting list for one of the coveted 15 spots, they completed dental assisting training, which taught them to operate radiographic equipment and sterilize medical instruments, among other skills.

Now, as the two students prepare to graduate and begin working as hygienists, the Appleton-based college is debuting a $2.1 million expansion to oral health training — so future students won’t have to wait as long to enroll. Across the state, 13 more campuses are unveiling similar projects. 

Following a $20 million investment from the Legislature, Wisconsin’s technical colleges are trying to solve the state’s dental worker shortage by revamping their oral health programs, constructing upgraded labs and enrolling hundreds more students. 

“We know that this is a need, and this expansion allows us to serve more students in these programs than we had previously, which means more hygienists, more assistants into the community and into the workforce quicker,” FVTC Chief Academic Officer Jennifer Lanter said.

Wisconsin’s dearth of dental workers has been well documented in recent years. Forty-two of Wisconsin’s 72 counties are impacted by the scarcity, according to the Rural Health Information Hub. 

Dentists are poorly distributed across the state, with an uneven share practicing in metropolitan areas and too few in rural regions. Too few dental hygienists and assistants — largely trained by technical schools — have entered the field to replace those who have retired in recent years.

Officials at nearly every Wisconsin technical college are looking to respond by expanding their training capacity. The technical college system trains about 2,200 students in oral health professions each year, and the new state funding will allow colleges to increase enrollment by about 10%, System President Layla Merrifield said. 

An influx of students graduating and entering the workforce should make booking oral health care appointments easier, industry officials say. 

“Not only was it a workforce issue for our dentist offices, but it was starting to impact patient care — access to care — where patients weren’t able to get their cleanings and their routine work done,” said Wisconsin Dental Association Executive Director Mark Paget. “It became a health issue for us, and thankfully, the Legislature understood the problem.”

‘It always boils down to money’

Industry leaders began staring down the barrel of a dental worker shortage roughly seven years ago. Then, an influx of hygienists retired during the COVID-19 pandemic, “throwing gasoline on the fire,” Paget said.

The dental association created a task force with the state’s technical college system, the Office of Rural Health and the Workforce Development Association to discuss solutions. 

It quickly identified a major snag keeping new workers from entering the profession: The state’s eight dental hygiene training programs were all at capacity, with students stuck on waiting lists to participate. 

“We met with the technical colleges several times and said, ‘OK, what would it take to increase your class sizes?’ Because that’s obviously where the problem is. There’s just not enough capacity for the schools to teach the classes,” Paget said. “The technical college said the magic words. It’s always money, right? It always boils down to money.”

Merrifield said the steep cost of installing equipment, such as chairs and tools, was a major barrier to colleges educating more students.

In FVTC’s case, that meant some of the dental lab spaces were physically cramped, which allowed room for fewer learners and sometimes led to errors. 

“The sterilization room … it was so small,” Beining, the student, recalled. “Things would get lost, people would get frustrated.”

In 2023, the dental association’s advocacy team lobbied the Legislature for more money to increase training capacity. Lawmakers allocated $20 million in that year’s budget to expand the oral health care workforce, such as increased class sizes, new programs and investments in equipment.

The funds flowed to the technical college system, which dispersed portions to schools as grants. Fourteen out of 16 colleges received a share, Merrifield said. 

While roughly half of the colleges offer dental hygiene programs, some funding went to assistant training and creating Expanded Function Dental Auxiliary certificate programs, which give advanced training to dental assistants. FVTC used grant funds to introduce an EFDA certificate this year.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Inside Lakeshore College’s dental lab, it might be easy to forget you’re on a college campus and not inside a dentist’s office. The space is outfitted with a reception desk and waiting room, 11 sleek dental chairs and a locker room for students to dress in their scrubs.

The college, based in Cleveland, Wisconsin, used its $1.2 million in grant funds to renovate its dental lab, upgrade equipment and introduce a dental hygiene associate degree. 

Previously, Lakeshore College offered only a semester-long dental assistant certificate. Now, the college will increase to training 15 assistant students each semester and enroll 10 more in the hygiene program. 

“There’s definitely a need in this area,” said Christina McGinnis, Lakeshore’s dental program coordinator. “Often when you call the dentist, it takes a long time to get in. So having more chairs, more students can definitely help fill that void in the local community.” 

Inside a newly constructed classroom, three stations are equipped with mannequin heads with wide-open mouths. The students will practice using their suction and cleaning instruments on the dummies before they work on real people. The simulators are just one of the technology upgrades the college was able to purchase with the grant funds, and they will help students become familiar with the tools they’ll use in the industry.

“(We’re) trying to stay on top of what’s out there, for what our students are going to be seeing when they go out to the community, working as assistants or hygienists,” McGinnis said. “They know what they’re going to be exposed to here, and then they’ll also see that in the dental world.”

Almost all Lakeshore College dental assisting students have a full-time job lined up when they graduate, McGinnis said, and it’s typical for students to enter the field earning $20 per hour. The college is waiting for a dental program accreditor to approve the hygienist degree. Officials hope it will launch in the fall of 2026.

Other Wisconsin technical colleges are starting programs tailored to needs in their service areas. For example, Madison Area Technical College recently renovated its lab and added an EFDA certificate program. Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, surrounded by rural counties with severe shortages, is introducing the state’s first dental therapist training. 

“If you’re growing up as a kid on Medicaid in the Northwoods, you almost never see a dentist. It’s very, very difficult to even see a hygienist,” Merrifield said. “So the idea with that particular program is to produce these professionals — not that they’re gonna compete with dentists because they can’t do everything that a dentist can do — but they can expand that access and make it a little bit easier.”

In the meantime, the industry just has to get through the next year or two before the additional students start graduating from the programs and filling the many empty jobs, Paget said. 

“The system works exactly how the system was supposed to work,” he said. “The technical colleges, the Legislature, the governor, everybody came together to solve a problem.”

This story was updated with the correct name for Lakeshore College. Wisconsin Watch regrets the error.

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.