Yeshiva University is rolling a brand-new dental school into Midtown Manhattan, planting classrooms and clinics right in Herald Square across from Macy’s. The College of Dental Medicine is built around an accelerated three-year DDS program and a network of specialty clinics, a setup the university says is meant to push graduates into practice faster and expand access to care at a moment when many older dentists are retiring and some neighborhoods are already struggling to find anyone who will take a look at their teeth.
What Yeshiva announced
According to The New York Times, the College of Dental Medicine will be located in the Herald Square area and would become the first dental school in Manhattan since 1916. The school plans to enroll roughly 150 students across its three-year program, pitching it as a quicker, clinic-heavy route into the profession that prioritizes time in the chair over time in the lecture hall.
Program design and price
Yeshiva’s academic catalog describes the degree as a 36-month, block-style DDS that leans hard into early patient care and digital dentistry, with plans for a sizable clinical footprint to support student training. The catalog lists tuition at $98,000 and mandatory fees at $22,000, for direct charges of roughly $126,500, and estimates the total yearly cost of attendance, including housing and living expenses, at about $178,520 for the 2026–27 budget year. According to Yeshiva University, applications for a Summer 2026 start were already being accepted while both institutional and program accreditations were still pending.
Clinic services and patient mix
The school plans to run integrated specialty clinics, including pediatric dentistry and orthodontics, inside the teaching facility. The New York Times reported that Yeshiva intends for those clinics to accept Medicaid patients. If that plays out as planned, the new operation would add publicly covered dental capacity in a city where many private practices either limit the number of Medicaid patients they see or avoid the program altogether.
Why the timing matters
Public-health analysts have been warning about a brewing workforce crunch. The American Dental Association’s Health Policy Institute has flagged a retirement "cliff," with a substantial share of older dentists leaving the workforce and a lopsided geographic spread that leaves some communities short on providers. Recent workforce analysis shows the overall dentist population skewing younger, even as many states still report a high proportion of dentists age 55 and older, a combination experts say feeds into so-called dental deserts. The ADA Health Policy Institute maps out those patterns and the access problems they create.
A controversial hire
Yeshiva has tapped Dr. Edward Farkas as dean of the new school. He previously helped develop another local dental program and has been a visible figure in regional dental education. Coverage in the dental press has noted that Touro University filed a complaint in early 2024 alleging that Farkas downloaded internal files before he left the institution, a claim he has denied. The dispute led to a temporary restraining order while the parties worked toward a resolution, according to Westfair.
What comes next
Yeshiva’s catalog states that the school is seeking approvals from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the Commission on Dental Accreditation and the New York State Education Department, and that decisions about matriculation will depend on securing those authorizations. For new predoctoral programs, the Commission on Dental Accreditation uses a staged review process that includes one or more site visits before a program can be fully accredited. Yeshiva University outlines an anticipated accreditation timeline in its materials, while CODA details the multi-step path that new schools must follow to obtain initial accreditation.
