you're competing against a ton of LDS people who value education and have a good chance of wanting to live in Utah. The Intermountain West has a much higher doctor/patient ratio in medicine, dentistry optometry, etc. than most of the rest of the country. That's partly due to the fact that a lot of Church members gravitate to those professions for a variety of reasons, but it's compounded by BYU's success in landing pre-professional students in the schools of their choice. At least when I was in school, BYU placed more students in dental school than any other university, by a long shot. BYU-I, USU, Utah, Weber State, etc. all contributed to it a lot as well. I'm not sure if that's still the case but it certainly was two-three decades ago.