[joshAg]

It's not just any degree, though. In addition to that, there is a set of classes that you have to complete (each med school has their own requirements, but practically speaking, they're roughly the same: http://www.georgetowncollege.edu/four-year-plan-medical-scho...).

So, sure, you can enter med school with a BA in English, but you still have to have taken undergraduate level organic chemistry.

Practically speaking, that means at each school there's 1 or 2 majors that will hit the typical premed requirements in the course of completing the undergraduate degree and a handful of other majors where a minor or even less than that will allow you to complete the premed requirements.

But all that said, yeah, they engage in blatant credentialism because they use it as a way to filter students out, because there's a much smaller supply of available medical school positions than there is demand for medical school positions. It's so blatant that it's usually better to go to a school with grade inflation or a less rigorous school where you know you can max out the GPA, than to go to the toughest undergraduate school you can because admissions doesn't do a great job of leveling different schools, so a 4.0 from University of Grade Inflation can still beat out a 3.5 from a more-renowned university.

[bradleyjg]

There’s no good reason for those prerequisites to be shoehorned into a random bachelor’s degree. Medical schools can add another year or eighteen months and teach their students those subjects themselves.

This way is more revenue for BigEd though.

[joshAg]

It's usually not a random degree. Usually it's like biology or molecular and cellular biology or maybe biochemistry or something like that, where the major itself is applicable to more than just medical school, it just happens to perfectly or nearly so overlap with medical school requirements.

An MD post-secondary degree is like 6 years, right? An undergrad and MD in the US is 8 years, so the difference isn't that much. That's basically just the general education requirements for an undergraduate degree, which as far as I can understand is just a general difference of the US vs european systems. US bachelors include a generality component absent in European degrees so the typical US undergrad takes a year or so longer than the typical European undergraduate degree.