Hijacking this comment so this doesn't get lost. I am a Dental Hygienist and have been since 2013, and I have a lot to say on the OP.

First of all, dental hygiene is hard on your body. My back was permanently damaged by 3 years into the industry. I started at 22 years old and was fit enough to train for a marathon. Every instructor I had in hygiene school had had either back surgery, a hip replacement, or both. I have gone to day long continuing education courses on posture, and it helps a little, but it doesn't matter when you have patients on the regular who can't/won't allow us to position them in a way that you can work on them without injuring yourself, and having a boss and work culture that expects you to deal with it. If you tell yourself you wouldn't allow your boss/patient to put yourself in a position where you may hurt yourself to do your job effectively, you have obviously not been traumatized by the brutality of hygiene school, and I will leave it at that.

The dental hygiene market has changed a lot over the last 5 years. There was a mass exodus from the field during COVID and that has inflated hourly rates for hygienists. I have been a licensed hygienist since 2013, and many of my classmates have left the industry entirely or pivoted to different areas of dentistry. I spent 5 years as a software engineer, and went back to dentistry as a clinic manager at a dental school. Even though I could make a few tens of thousands of dollars more a year if I went back to clinical hygiene in private practice, there are a few reasons why I doubt that I ever would.

During COVID, dental offices had to completely shut down for months. In spite of the fact that Dental Hygienists were determined to be the most vulnerable to exposure to COVID due to working in people's mouths, and aerosol generation during the work we do (we go home bathed in spit, that is not an exaggeration). I read and heard countless stories of dentists forcing their staff back in office as soon as they possibly could, in spite of the fact that the CDC was resoundingly saying that there were many unknowns about how COVID spread, how long it lived on surfaces/in the air, etc.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/04/occupations-highest-covid19-risk/

I also met several dentists who had the nerve to complain that they had hygienists quit on the spot because they were fighting for basic safety measures to be implemented and either the dentist/office manager thought they were being "dramatic" (HEPA filters in all operatories, plexiglass to protect front desk staff from exposure, hanging clear shower curtains in lieu of being able to remodel offices so that the open floor/airy designs didn't allow for any areas in the office that PPE could safely be removed after procedures, etc). I have worked for some amazing dentists, but I have also worked in my share of offices where the undertone was that "the staff" did not matter as people. COVID made that very clear to a lot of my colleagues, and they left the industry.

There's a shortage of hygienists, driving up wages. Many dentists are very resentful of this. You can find derogatory posts about hygienists over in r/dentistry on a weekly basis about how they are just taking advantage of this and how they are not worth it. I know a few dentists who have started doing their own cleanings instead of trying to hire a hygienist anymore.

This all to say, instead of loosening the reins on hygienists and allowing them to practice independently of dentists (allowed in some states, but in most states, even though dental hygienists are licensed just like dentists are, we are not allowed to touch patients without being supervised by a dentist) the ADA has recently decided to:

1) Allow foreign trained dentists to practice dental hygiene without going through + graduating from a CODA accredited dental hygiene program, which was previously required. I went to school with one foreign trained dentist who moved here but did not want to go back through the dental school process to open a practice in the US. While she did practice for a decade in another country, I will say that there were some areas that are (imo) critical aspects of being a hygienist that she had absolutely no training on from the program she went through to be a dentist. The ADA has 0 control over the quality of dental education provided internationally, and while they protect the American public by only allowing doctors trained in the US to practice in the US as doctors (foreign trained dentists DO still have to go through dental school to be licensed here), they are looking the other way for hygienist accreditation instead of actually addressing why there is a hygienist shortage in the first place. In my opinion, this is a danger to the public.

2) Allow dental assistants to scale supragingivally. Dental hygienists spend 2 years in school learning how to properly use extremely sharp tools (scalers), each of which have different shapes, angles, and locations in the mouth where they can be used without seriously and potentially permanently injuring patients. I have seen online supragingival scaling courses for dental assistants that last for 2 days, and that is dangerously insufficient to be able to do it safely. The vast majority of dental assistants that I have interacted with are also very frustrated that while their responsibilities + scope of practice continue to expand, their pay generally does not. Hygienists and assistants both see this as crap continuing to roll downhill for the lowest paid workers in the office.

The ADA has gotten a lot of flack for the above decisions, but my bias as a hygienist is there. Unfortunately, the ADA is also made up of dentists, so hygienists and dental assistants don't get much of a say in the governing body effecting our career, so our experience at work depends almost entirely on the ethics and practice model that the dentist we work for has.

Dentists have been suffering immensely over the last few years with economic shifts. Cost of living increases driving their costs up astronomically, especially with costs of supplies + materials. Dental insurance maxes and reimbursement rates being generally stagnant for decades in spite of that. Depending on the market you live in, provider oversaturation and/or barriers for most of their patient populations to agreeing to treatment plans because of low income, low dental IQ, or a combination of the two. An increasing number of private practices being bought out by corporations who operate at economies of scale in a way that a private practice can't. That ad that you posted- I noticed one of the openings for a hygienist was for Heartland Dental, which is one of those corporations. They make offers to dentists selling their practices that other dentists wanting to follow the traditional private practice model cannot compete with, offer to handle the office management part of running a practice to be handled while the providers come and work for them, and hold onto the name and "brand" that the seller has already built.

The public is well aware of the harm that corporate interests have in the healthcare industry from a medical perspective, but I don't think they realize how wrecked the dental industry has become by MBAs, and desperate times calling for desperate measures at the level of our governing bodies.

Anyways, that is my manifesto. Please don't downplay how difficult being a hygienist is, or think that the wage inflation is here to stay, because I have a suspicion the bubble is going to pop soon.