Almost every law school orientation includes a specific moment when the dean informs incoming students that the degree they will be earning for three years and about $217,000 is not actually an academic credential at all. After passing the bar exam, it’s a license to practice. It sounds like a technical distinction. It isn’t. It influences everything, including a graduate’s eligibility for federal loans and how their resume is reviewed.
In general, a professional degree is designed to immediately place a person in a regulated field, such as law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, or architecture. Instead of emphasizing inquiry, the curriculum heavily emphasizes application. Instead of writing dissertations, students are learning how to draft structural plans, set bones, and read contracts. The majority of programs require applicants to have a bachelor’s degree already, and in professions like law and medicine, the degree is merely the first step. It takes time, sometimes years, to pass a licensing exam.
The question of where the line actually lies has recently become more complicated. The U.S. Department of Education discreetly redrew it towards the end of last year. The federal definition used for some loan programs excluded programs in nursing, public health, and physical therapy—fields that had long assumed professional status, at least informally. The fallout, which Forbes covered, is still having an impact on nursing schools that developed financial aid packages based on a false premise.
For what it’s worth, the federal requirements are quite detailed. A program must have at least two years of prior college coursework, be at least six years long overall, and conclude with a licensing exam. The bar is easily cleared by a Juris Doctor, a Doctor of Medicine, or a Doctor of Pharmacy. Although many public health professionals would object to being told that their training isn’t “professional” in the common sense, a two-year master’s program in the field frequently doesn’t.
People frequently make mistakes with the MBA, so it’s worth stopping here. Indeed, an MBA is graduate-level training for business leaders. However, unlike lawyers or pharmacists, MBA holders are not licensed by state boards, so they do not fall under the professional degree category like a JD. Strangely, the same reasoning doesn’t always hold true for engineering or education, two disciplines that, depending on the school, fall somewhere between professional and academic.
Cost usually follows this division. Nowadays, the average cost of medical school is almost $229,000, and that doesn’t include residency, which can take an additional three to seven years, depending on the specialty. Debt loads from law school are smaller but still substantial. Even though it doesn’t help the eighteen-year-old who must choose a major, the financial logic of “professional” versus “academic” begins to make more sense when compared to a stand-alone master’s, which typically costs about $63,000.
Additionally, none of this is just bureaucratic nitpicking. Physical therapy and veterinary medicine are seeing faster job growth than most white-collar occupations, and a misclassification can subtly impact borrowing limits for a whole incoming class. Observing this unfold gives the impression that the definition of “professional degree” was never as clear-cut as it appeared from the outside. One federal rule and one industry backlash at a time, the issue is still being debated.
