Dental Council tries to prevent the opening of new undergraduate courses in the area

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The CFO (Federal Council of Dentistry) filed a lawsuit this Monday (3) to prevent new undergraduate courses in the area from being created.

The entity also wants institutions that already offer dental classes to be prohibited from increasing the number of vacancies.

The action calls for the veto to take effect immediately and remain in effect for at least five years.

According to the entity, the objective is to avoid opening courses in an uncontrolled way and focus on the quality of graduations in the area.

The president of the CFO, Juliano do Vale, said in a note released by the entity that the suspension of new courses is related to the sustainability of the profession in the medium and long term.

“It is understood that the quality of education offered can be harmed in the format it is today, and it can even put the health of society at risk,” he said.

The public action also has a second requirement: to paralyze the possibility of creating new vacancies in faculties that already have authorization from the MEC (Ministry of Education). Thus, institutions would only have to continue with the number of vacancies they already have available at the moment.

In the public action document, the CFO argues that dentistry courses have skyrocketed in recent years.

“In just four years, from 2015 to 2019, the number of educational institutions offering degrees in dentistry grew by 87%, from 220 to 412 faculties. This increase reveals a trend of crisis in the profession, if the format that is applied don’t go through change today.”

More recent data from the 2020 Higher Education Census already point to a higher number: 461 higher education institutions offer dentistry courses, resulting in the 18th position of the courses with the highest number of faculties.

Student enrollment is also one of the highest rates, with 137,092 enrolled in 2020. However, the number of graduates in the year was much lower: only 18,689 actually graduated.

In the public action, the CFO also cites a similar process brought by the CFM (Federal Council of Medicine) that had the same objective for undergraduate courses in medicine.

In 2018, the MEC accepted CFM’s request to freeze new courses and veto the increase in vacancies.

Then, in 2019, the CFO filed a similar request with the MEC as it understood that the measures also applied to dentistry as it was training in the health area. In the public action, the CFO claims that he has not received, so far, a response from the MEC to this request.

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