Medical school is technically a form of graduate-level education, but it is not “grad school” in the way most people use that term. The U.S. Department of Education classifies the MD and DO degrees as professional degrees, a category separate from academic graduate degrees like a master’s or PhD. When someone says they’re “going to grad school,” they almost always mean a master’s or doctoral research program, not medical school. The distinction matters for admissions, funding, curriculum, and what comes after.
Professional Degree vs. Academic Degree
The federal government groups the MD and DO with other professional degrees: law (JD), dentistry (DDS), pharmacy (PharmD), veterinary medicine (DVM), and several others. These programs share a defining trait: they train you for a specific licensed profession. You cannot legally practice medicine without an MD or DO, just as you cannot practice law without a JD. The degree itself is a gatekeeping credential.
Academic graduate degrees, by contrast, are research-oriented. A master’s or PhD program focuses on building expertise in a field of study, typically requiring a thesis, dissertation, or capstone project. The goal is to produce new knowledge or develop advanced analytical skills, not to qualify for a single licensed profession. A PhD in biology doesn’t legally entitle you to do anything specific the way an MD does.
Both categories sit above the bachelor’s degree in the educational hierarchy, which is why medical school sometimes gets lumped under the “graduate school” umbrella. But in practice, the two tracks differ in nearly every way that matters to students.
Different Admissions Paths
Medical schools require a completed four-year bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution, along with specific prerequisite courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and other sciences. The entrance exam is the MCAT, a 7.5-hour test covering four sections: chemical and physical foundations, critical analysis and reasoning, biological and biochemical foundations, and psychological and social foundations. The maximum score is 528.
Most master’s and PhD programs use the GRE instead, a shorter exam (just under 2 hours) that tests analytical writing, verbal reasoning, and quantitative reasoning, with a maximum score of 170 per section. Some graduate programs have dropped standardized testing requirements entirely in recent years. Medical school admissions also tend to weigh clinical experience, volunteering, and specific extracurriculars more heavily than a typical graduate program would.
How the Curriculum Differs
Medical school follows a structured, standardized curriculum with little room for elective exploration, especially in the first two years. Students move through preclinical coursework as a cohort, covering anatomy, pharmacology, pathology, and related subjects on a fixed schedule. The third and fourth years shift to clinical rotations (called clerkships), where students rotate through hospital departments like surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, and psychiatry to gain hands-on patient care experience.
A PhD program looks almost nothing like this. After some initial coursework, students typically spend most of their time conducting original research under a faculty advisor. The timeline is open-ended: a PhD can take anywhere from four to seven years or more, depending on the field and how the research progresses. The endpoint is a dissertation, an original contribution to knowledge that the student defends before a committee. Medical school, by comparison, is almost always four years with a clearly defined finish line.
Funding and Financial Aid
This is one of the starkest differences. Many PhD programs fully fund their students through tuition waivers and stipends in exchange for teaching or research work. Medical students rarely receive this kind of support. Instead, they typically finance their education through federal loans.
For financial aid purposes, medical students are automatically classified as independent students on the FAFSA, meaning parental income isn’t factored in. They have access to Direct Unsubsidized Loans and Direct PLUS Loans for graduate and professional students. But the total cost of medical school is steep, and most graduates carry six-figure debt. PhD students in funded programs often graduate with little or no debt from the degree itself.
What Comes After the Degree
Finishing medical school doesn’t mean you can start practicing independently. New MDs and DOs must complete a residency, a supervised training period that lasts three to seven years depending on the specialty. Residency is mandatory for medical licensure. Some doctors then pursue an additional fellowship for subspecialty training. This means the total post-college training for a physician can stretch to 11 years or more.
PhD graduates face no equivalent mandatory training period. Some pursue postdoctoral research positions to strengthen their academic credentials before seeking faculty jobs, but a postdoc isn’t legally required to use the degree. A PhD holder can move directly into industry, government, consulting, or other careers the moment they graduate.
The MD-PhD Exception
Some students pursue both degrees simultaneously through combined MD-PhD programs, which typically take seven to eight years. These programs merge the medical curriculum with graduate-level research training, and students complete both clerkships and a doctoral dissertation. To bridge the gap between the research years and clinical work, many MD-PhD programs include refresher courses or clinical “boot camps” before students return to hospital rotations. These dual-degree students genuinely straddle both worlds, training as both physicians and research scientists.
Why the Label Matters
Whether you call medical school “grad school” might seem like a semantic question, but it has practical consequences. Scholarship databases, loan repayment programs, and institutional policies often distinguish between graduate students and professional students. Some university services, housing options, or funding opportunities available to graduate students may not extend to medical students, and vice versa. If you’re comparing paths, understanding that medical school occupies its own category helps you research costs, timelines, and career outcomes more accurately.
The short version: medical school is post-baccalaureate education, so it’s graduate-level in a broad sense. But it is a professional degree program with its own admissions process, curriculum structure, funding model, and mandatory post-degree training. Calling it “grad school” is technically not wrong, but it obscures more than it clarifies.