Thus, the advantages of the combined programs are. students! Please continue to study while you are in the program! The great thing is, many school offer these combined/guaranteed programs for many of the healthcare fields including Medicine, Pharmacy, and Dentistry! So please contact your schools in the area for your high schoolers and find out if any of the colleges/universities offer this.., can enjoy your free time more during your undergraduate years. Also, many of these programs allow you to apply out to other medical school and break the contract with them, just in case a different medical school is where your heart is set on (this will free up your slot for a different applicant).. Basically, when high school students are applying to colleges during their senior year, those who know that they would like to pursue a career in the field of medicine can choose to apply to one of these combined/guaranteed programs. They were able to get their academic life back together eventually, but, they had to apply like regular students to medical school. For any competitive medical school applicant, you would have done ALL of the above anyways on your journey to applying for medical school! Some of the programs have some larger differences, certain school may ask you to take the MCAT and attain a minimum score to make sure the student was not slacking off during their undergraduate years,some may ask your student to participate in research, etc. Here are a couple. So, your student, if accepted, is not only accepted into that college/university, but also accepted into the medical school at the same time! So what's the catch? Well, the details vary from program to program and can not be discussed here. Some programs are set up in the traditional manner (4 year of undergraduate and 4 years of medical school), while others allow you to skip one year of undergraduate, and other will allow you to finish the whole process in just 6 years!!!