Dr. Jazmin Cromartie-Hicks, Director of Student Admissions and Engagement & Clinical Assistant Professor, Workman School of Dental Medicine

Invest: spoke with Dr. Jazmin Cromartie-Hicks, director of Student Admissions and Engagement and clinical assistant professor at High Point University’s Workman School of Dental Medicine, about the school’s strong admissions momentum, early clinical training model, and long-term plans to expand access to care in North Carolina. “We absolutely need more dentists. We absolutely need better access to care, and that is what we are trying to do at the Workman School of Dental Medicine and HPU Health,” Cromartie-Hicks said.

How has this past admissions cycle shaped your approach to enrollment and student engagement at the dental school?

The 2025-2026 admission cycle was another record-breaking cycle for the HPU WSDM. As a new program, in the last three cycles, we have averaged over 1,000 applications with prospective students from all over the country. Several hundred are North Carolina residents, as is nearly 30% of our admitted cohort. In our first cycle, we had over 1,400 applications. The following cycle, we had 1,260 applications, and this most recent cycle,1,375, many of which are also reapplicants. We are demonstrating that our integrated curriculum is preparing learners for the future of dental medicine. That, along with our investment in technology and innovation, is attracting students to our program.

Of note, we chose not to participate in the centralized portal that is used by most dental schools. Our program recruitment has been largely supported by in-person open house events, word of mouth, and virtual informational sessions to reach a greater number of applicants. Our application process is designed to highlight the candidate and their alignment with our program’s mission, vision, and values. Our admissions and interview process involves high-level engagement; we take pride in that. Prospective candidates who visit leave with a strong understanding of our investment in them as future students, and the resources we have to offer as a new dental school.

We annually review all candidate and volunteer feedback in attempts to improve our application and interview process for each cycle. The continued interest in our admissions really speaks to the true collective effort of our DMD admissions team, our graduate admissions team, and High Point University. 

With demand so strong, how do you balance selectivity with access, and what are you looking for most in applicants?

As evidenced in their application to our program, we are ultimately seeking candidates who have a growth mindset, who are passionate about servant leadership, and who desire to advance our profession with tools of innovation and research to improve patient care. We are training the dentists of the future with technology that reflects that goal.

Our goal is to identify and highlight students who are most aligned with our program, our mission, vision, and values. We further narrow down applicants by designing a comprehensive application and holistic admissions process. Our application is strategically designed to highlight the applicant so that we can observe those parallels. We use aggregated faculty committee feedback to yield a competitive cohort of 60 students for each cycle, after nearly 250 in-person candidate interviews. The most difficult part of our job is knowing we cannot admit all students that are deserving of being here. 

We also have a healthy Active Reserve pool, similar to a waitlist, of candidates awaiting admission that has not seen much movement over the past three years; this speaks to the loyalty of first-time admits to our program. Of our current first-year students, 50% were reapplicants, demonstrating that there is also a strong continued interest in our program. Our application is free of charge, as the WSDM is committed to addressing the financial burden of applying to dental school. We also do not require the Dental Admissions Test (DAT), and as a result, we believe that this also attracts many nontraditional applicants to our program. 

Additionally, like many other dental schools, we use situational judgment testing to assess an applicant’s soft skills like empathy, critical decision making, and emotional intelligence. This year, we are using Kira Talent, an organization that affords our program full autonomy to design our own competencies and rubrics. This will help our team narrow down the competitive selection of prospective students for interview invitations. 

What is your view on return on investment, and what outcomes do you hope to see from graduates?

Many will argue that a professional program’s distinction is often characterized in part by its alumni, as they are typically the leading ambassadors for their school. We hope that when our students graduate, they go on as living embodiments of our mission to further carry out our CARE curriculum as developed clinicians, advocates, researchers, and entrepreneurs. 

We are developing leaders who are Clinicians: delivering comprehensive care in emerging and established healthcare delivery models; Advocates: serving as ethical champions who will strengthen access to care disparities and improve public health; Researchers: using population health and precision health to elevate healthcare delivery and patient outcomes; and Entrepreneurs: who use sound judgement in complex healthcare enterprise systems involving mergers and acquisition, healthcare administration, and startup/venture. 

We really emphasize that dental education must do more than just produce a competent and confident clinician. We need to elevate future practitioners as advocates for our profession, for our patients, and the communities they serve. We know our graduates will use evidence-based literature to inform their decision-making and treatment planning and become leaders in organized dentistry to help drive policy that influences both our profession and patients who need our care.

We also incorporate practice management early within our curriculum, as many students want to own their own practice or pursue multi-practice ownership after graduation. We are hoping to observe a wide distribution of students who will seek professional employment in public health, academia, private practice, and/or specialty practice after residency.

How does the school’s clinical model help prepare students?

We are the first dental school to have an academic oral health system, which is a school-owned practice network called HPU Health. Our students rotate through different practice sites — some operating like private practices, while others are much larger for specialty training. We also have Federally Qualified Health Center partnerships. Additionally, the HPU WSDM and Wake Forest School of Medicine have established a partnership to develop residency programs that promote medical-dental integration.

Instead of a traditional 100-plus chair clinic, our clinical sites are vast across an ecosystem of dental offices where our faculty continue to practice. That is different from a traditional dental school, where many faculty dentists may be retired and no longer practicing. We are actively practicing and seeing patients, and our students, much like the medical model, are seeing patients alongside our clinicians under direct supervision. 

What does early hands-on exposure look like in practice?

We provide a diversity of clinical exposure for our learners. Our students begin their clinical practice rotations, or experiential rotations as we call them, within the eighth week of their first semester of dental school. They do not begin procedures right away, but do shadow each of the roles in the office to observe how they all work together as a team.

Within the first couple of weeks, they learn to take vitals on patients and chart medical histories in our electronic health record of Epic. They are also learning about pre-authorizations and dental insurance and evaluating practice financials, which many dental school curricula do not traditionally cover. 

As they are gaining their competency skills didactically, they go on to train in simulation labs that may include virtual reality haptics, and soon after, apply their skills in practice through their experiential rotations in our HPU Health network. Our current second-year students are now spending two full days in practice doing simple operative and prosthodontic procedures with faculty supervision. 

How does the broader High Point University experience strengthen recruitment and culture within the dental school?

As an alumna of High Point University, this is the school where my dream of becoming a dentist first began. Our call to action, “Choose to be Extraordinary,” is something we all strive for each day. Whether you are faculty, a staff member, or a student here at High Point University, inspiration is plentiful as you walk around our campus. Innovation is truly within our school’s DNA, and this is demonstrated in every academic building you encounter. Our campus culture is contagious and incredibly student centric. There is intentionality behind preparing students for the world as it will be. We are the Premier Life Skills University, which speaks to the development of what a future clinician should have as part of their professional journey. Life skills of communication, leadership, and a growth mindset are essential for healthcare providers in training. Prospective students continue to acknowledge HPU’s unique culture as a values-based school, and the abundant resources available to them as learners. 

What else should readers understand about the school’s growth and role in North Carolina?

The Workman School of Dental Medicine joined an impressive group of graduate health science programs at High Point University. The growth of programs here in the last decade is astounding. We are the third dental school and the only private dental school in North Carolina. In addition to offering our Doctor of Medicine in Dentistry degree, we are one of few programs in the country that offers an accelerated Dental Medicine Scholars (2+4) program, which is for High Point University undergraduates only. We are rapidly developing our in-house digital dentistry labs to provide accessibility for advanced training in 3D printing and CAD-CAM, which will allow us to influence better patient outcomes and services. 

Our post-doctoral programs feature our CODA-accredited Advanced Education in General Dentistry (AEGD) residency, a fellowship in Digital Dentistry, and a fellowship in Oral Oncology. We are the only dental school to have three large hospital partnerships, two of which are Atrium Wake Forest Baptist and Novant Health.

Due to our innovative model, HPU’s dental programs have attracted highly specialized talent from all parts of the country and world, ranging from UPenn and Harvard all the way to dental institutions in Israel. HPU’s innovative model has attracted visitors from the National University of Singapore, the University of Eastern Finland, and a new emerging school in Denmark. Over 250 new jobs have been created since the inception of our academic oral health system. Our HPU Health dental network provides care to patients from all walks of life, including those who have no insurance, Medicaid/Medicare, and special needs, all across the state, ranging from Durham to Statesville. 

At full census, HPU Health will be providing nearly 500,000 patient visits per year.

HPU is on an integrated health record, known as EPIC or “MyChart”, with a special research module known as Cosmos. This opens access to real-world data for population health outcomes for North Carolinians. A recent study was published between HPU, Yale and Harvard to study the side effect (toxicity) outcomes of breast cancer patients on newer therapies (antibody drug conjugates), which used HPU’s EPIC Cosmos. 

We absolutely need more dentists. We absolutely need better access to care, and that is what we are trying to do at the Workman School of Dental Medicine and HPU Health.