One University, Three Very Different Prices

It is natural to think of tuition as something a university charges. In this catalog it is closer to something a subject costs, and the same institution will happily quote you three different numbers.

That first row is the useful one for shortlisting. If you are undecided between two of these degrees, you do not have to change country to change what you pay. At 56 of 65 universities, changing subject already does it.

The nine that price everything the same are worth naming, because they are the exception and they cluster: Carol Davila, George Emil Palade, Grigore T. Popa, Iuliu Hațieganu, Lucian Blaga Sibiu and Ovidius Constanța — all Romanian — plus Novi Sad in Serbia, and Queen Mary University of London and Plymouth in the UK. Six of the nine are in one country, which is a pattern rather than a coincidence; see studying medicine in Romania.

Thirty-seven universities in this catalog publish a comparable annual fee for both medicine and pharmacy. Pharmacy is cheaper at 35 of them. The median pharmacy fee is about 62 percent of the medicine fee at the same institution — so as a rough planning rule, pharmacy costs roughly two-thirds of what medicine costs where you are looking.

Those gaps are larger than the entire annual fee at most Eastern European medical schools. A year of pharmacy at Trinity and a year of medicine at Trinity differ by more than the cost of a full year of medicine in Romania, Bulgaria or Serbia.

The pattern holds on the continent too, at smaller absolute numbers: Charles University charges €15,726 for medicine and €7,900 for pharmacy; Debrecen €14,444 and €6,838; European University Cyprus €23,000 and €9,240. If pharmacy is genuinely one of your options, this is the single largest cost lever available to you, and it does not require compromising on the university.

One caution before you read too much into it. Across the whole catalog pharmacy's median looks like the *highest* of the three, because most priced pharmacy programs in this catalog are UK MPharm courses at UK prices — that decomposition is in medicine, dentistry or pharmacy in Europe. Within one university, the discount is real. Across the catalog, the headline is an artifact of where pharmacy is taught.

Dentistry is the one that resists a rule. Of the 50 universities pricing both medicine and dentistry:

So the common assumption — dentistry is dearer because of the lab and chair time — holds at slightly under half of them and is flatly wrong at nine. The reversals are worth seeing, because several are large:

Cardiff charges €35,498 for dentistry against €54,866 for medicine, a €19,368 gap in dentistry's favor. Dundee charges €47,293 against €64,637. Glasgow, Birmingham and Lancashire all price dentistry below medicine as well. On the continent, Zagreb lists dentistry at €10,000 and medicine at €12,000, and Craiova €6,500 against €8,500.

The 17 identical ones are almost all Romanian, plus Queen Mary and Plymouth in the UK. Where a university charges one international rate across its health faculty, subject choice stops being a money question entirely and goes back to being a career question — which is the right way round.

If dentistry is your subject, the ranked fee list is in cheapest dental schools in Europe, and what the admission actually asks for is in dental school admissions in Europe.

Compare subjects before you compare countries. People usually do it the other way around — pick a country, then a subject. If two of these degrees would genuinely suit you, the subject decision moves more money at a fixed university than the country decision moves at a fixed subject.

Check the fee on the program page, not the university page. A university quoting "from €7,900" is often quoting its cheapest faculty. The per-program figures on this site come from the university's own published fee for that exact route, which is what the cost calculator prefills from.

Do not let the fee alone decide. Pharmacy is cheaper at 35 of 37 universities and it is also a different profession with a different route home. What that route involves is in pharmacy licensing in North America; the medicine equivalents are medicine licensing in Canada and in the USA. A cheaper degree you do not want to practice is not a saving.

And check the length. Pharmacy is usually shorter than medicine, which compounds the annual difference — the durations are in how long is medical school in Europe, and the full multi-year arithmetic in the real total cost of medical school.