Spring 2026 Company Benchmarks

We asked 1,208 of our graduates how we did. Here’s what they said.

By David Roux, President & CEO, Accelerated Academy  ·  June 2026

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At Accelerated Academy, we talk a lot about community. About showing up. About doing what we say we’re going to do. Those aren’t marketing lines — they are the standard we hold every instructor, every location, and every team member to every single term.

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So every term, we ask our graduates to tell us the truth. Not a testimonial. Not a highlight reel. A real, anonymous survey, sent to every student at every location, asking them to rate their instructor, their clinic experience, and whether they would recommend us to someone they love.

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This is Spring 2026. These are our numbers. We’re posting them publicly because having integrity is part of what it means to be a community worth trusting.

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Spring 2026: the national results

These results come from 1,208 students across 149 locations nationwide.

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What community actually looks like in practice

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Community isn't a value we put on a wall — it's infrastructure we spent years building. Over 50,000 platform followers. Student-only support threads. Instructor collaboration channels. Doctor networking spaces where our dental partners connect, hire, and grow. Our students, instructors, and team members built every piece of it, one mission, one Saturday at a time. Any school can teach you to take X-rays. Only one built an entire community around making sure you succeed after you do.

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That community shows up in person every week. Our students train inside real dental practices from day one — not simulation labs, not classrooms dressed up to look like offices. An actual dental practice, with a working instructor who gave up their Saturday mornings because they believe the next generation of dental assistants deserves better than a textbook. That's a relationship. And relationships are what produce a 4.63 instructor rating across 149 locations and nearly 1,200 students.

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“My overall experience in this course has improved my social and intellectual growth exponentially. I love both of my instructors for taking time out of their Saturday mornings to teach us things that we’ll need for years to come.”

— Spring 2026 graduate

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Why dentist-partners are at the center of this

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We cannot build that kind of community without the dental practices who host our programs. When a practice opens its doors to our students on Saturdays, they are doing something more than lending us a space. They are investing in the future of their profession.

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Our partner practices get first access to graduates who already know how their office runs, who trained under their roof, and who chose this career because of what they experienced in that environment. That is a hiring pipeline that no job board can replicate.

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An 86.7% recommendation rate and a 95% pass rate aren’t just student satisfaction metrics — they are signals to every dental practice evaluating whether our graduates are worth hiring. The data says yes.

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For the person still deciding

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If you’re weighing a 10-week program against a longer credentialing path, here is what I want you to know: the question isn’t just how fast you can finish. It’s what you walk out with.

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Our graduates train in real dental offices. They sit beside working professionals. They build relationships inside practices before they ever submit a resume. When they show up for their first day on the job, they aren’t starting from scratch — they’re coming home to an environment they already know.

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801 of our rolling 3-term graduates started their careers this year. Some of them were hired before courses even ended. That happens when training feels like community, not coursework.

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“I got hired with 3 weeks left of school and I have no complaints at all about the program.”

— Spring 2026 graduate

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Where we’re still pushing

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A 4.30 clinic score is solid. It is not where I want it. The clinic is where hands-on confidence is either built or missed — and I know some of our locations execute that better than others. Closing that gap is an active priority going into Fall 2026.

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An 86.7% recommendation rate means roughly 1 in 8 students finished the term and weren’t ready to send someone they care about to us. We take that personally. Every location debrief begins with that number — not to explain it away, but to understand it and fix it.

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We publish these numbers because we’d rather be held accountable to them than hide behind the ones that look good.

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A word from our president

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David Roux President & CEO, Accelerated Academy

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We started this company because our founder believed vocational education could do better — not just academically, but relationally. The dental industry needs more trained assistants. Career changers need a real path in. And dental practices need a partner they can trust to send them people who are ready.

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Community is how we solve all three of those problems at once. Not as a concept. As a model. When a student walks into a dental practice on their first Saturday, they’re not just showing up for training — they’re entering a community that is rooting for them to succeed.

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That’s what these numbers reflect. And that’s the standard we’ll keep publishing ourselves against, every single term.

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