The Mentorship Paradox in Dental Education: Deep Understanding for a Better Professional Identity Formation—A Narrative Review

Background/Objectives: Mentorship is widely recognized as essential to professional identity formation, clinical competency, and faculty pipeline development in dental education. Despite this consensus, the conditions of modern academic dentistry—faculty burnout, role multiplicity, and escalating clinical production demands—have made sustained mentorship increasingly difficult to deliver. This review proposes a “Mentorship Paradox” as a conceptual framework connecting these conditions, differentiates mentorship from coaching as distinct developmental interventions, and examines the structural and methodological gaps in the literature that bear on this framework. Methods: This narrative review is based on a structured, documented search of PubMed/MEDLINE and ERIC (search date 19 September 2026) for peer-reviewed literature published 2005–2026, combining mentorship/coaching/advising terms with dental-, health-profession-, and higher-education terms. Records were deduplicated and screened against defined eligibility criteria by a single reviewer, and the authors then selected the sources used in the synthesis. No protocol was registered, and no formal risk-of-bias assessment or structured data extraction was performed. Results: Database searching identified 1404 records (PubMed n = 1329; ERIC n = 75); after removing 21 records outside the date range and 20 duplicates, 1363 records were screened by title and abstract, of which 792 were excluded and 571 were retained for abstract-level assessment, leaving 136 dental-education-specific records; the authors drew on this pool, together with background and adjacent-field sources, to select the 59 references cited in the narrative synthesis. Drawing on the literature identified to date, this review organizes existing findings around a proposed three-stage cycle—faculty emotional depletion, mentee pipeline deterrence, and vacancy solidification—that individual cross-sectional studies document in fragments but that has not yet been tested as a connected, longitudinal phenomenon. Four specific gaps are named: the absence of a dose–response metric defining the faculty-to-student ratio at which mentorship becomes difficult to sustain (the Dose–Response problem); the failure of workload models to account for the affective labor mentorship demands (the Invisible Load problem); the scarcity of longitudinal outcome studies identified in this search (the Longitudinal Void); and the field’s reliance on satisfaction surveys that may measure comfort rather than developmental impact (the Satisfaction Trap). Conclusions: Dental schools cannot resolve the Mentorship Paradox by exhorting overburdened faculty to mentor more. Resolution requires institutional frameworks that treat mentor capacity as a finite, measurable resource alongside a shift toward longitudinal, outcome-validated research designs capable of testing whether mentorship in dental education produces the professional and academic outcomes the field assumes it does.