Numerous studies have shown that education correlates with tooth loss and dental services use, but whether expanding educational opportunities would reduce tooth loss and improve dental attendance remains unclear given that prior studies lacked a study design to assess causality. We leveraged a policy reform, raising the school leaving age, as an instrumental variable (IV) to estimate the effect of education on edentulism and dental visits in the United States using the repeated cross-sectional data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS