Everyone in the US knows that people who did not complete high school or did not do well enough in it to make it into a highly respected four year school as a freshman can still obtain a Bachelor’s degree by getting a GED (by open enrollment exam) if needed and enrolling in an open-enrollment community college that will take anyone with a high school diploma or equivalency for the first two years, and if they do well enough, they can transfer to UCLA, Virginia Tech, or maybe even Harvard or Yale and get a full, regionally accredited Bachelor’s degree. The student is not preemptively told “You are too old” or “Your past performance indicates that you are a forever failure, the train left the station with your high school friends who made it, and you will never have the chance to try again” and denied an opportunity to try - rather they are explicitly given the opportunity to try to make it in using their own skills, experience, and effort notwithstanding their academic backgrounds.
To what extent is this true in the US beyond the bachelor’s degree level? Are there grad school equivalents to community colleges where anyone with a BS or BA (notwithstanding a noncompetitive GPA or poor/no recommendations from professors) can take the first semester or two of a graduate program and if they do well enough (e.g. 3.0 average), they can transfer to another school or a degree track in the same school and finish with a Master’s or Doctorate?
To what extent are second chances/alternate tracks/mature tracks available outside the US? For example, can a 60 year old Japanese person who never completed high school but has educated themself over the years just up and take the Tokyo University entrance exam and, if they do well enough, expect to be granted enrollment? Can a 28 year old British person who never took A levels when they were a teen take them now and apply to Oxford?
Please don’t say, “Non traditional students can’t possibly meet the practical expectations expected in class even if they were to be given a chance.” unless you have hard data to back that up. There’s an entire movement here in the US to help flunkouts or dropouts get their GED’s and go to college and many people succeed.
Masters programs serve that purpose for many people. Many masters programs are fairly noncompetitive or at least not very competitive and don’t require a bachelors degree in the same subject to be qualified for admission. You can use such programs to gain later admission to a PhD program if you do well enough. Students who did strong undergraduate work often enroll in a PhD program right after the bachelors degree. Many PhD programs also grant a masters degree in the middle of the program but those are mostly symbolic and not the same as masters degrees granted through terminal masters programs.
Most universities in the US will allow you to enroll as a non-degree student and take classes. It’s possible to get admitted to a master’s program that way–I know a guy who did it at Columbia–but it’s not really an organized thing the way that the GED is.
There are also post-baccalaureate programs in various disciplines that are designed to offer the classes that someone needs to go on to graduate programs. But they tend to be more for professional programs, and are generally pretty competitive.
Doctoral programs are a whole different animal entirely. Each program is run by the faculty of the department it’s in, so it’s almost impossible to say that something isn’t done, but there are enough strong applicants to any reasonable program that they’d never have to take someone who wasn’t very well-prepared.
I believe this is called a “grad special” in some places. I don’t know how widespread this is, though.
“Grad school” is a broad term, but usually “transfer” is not a term that exists in grad school. If you want to go to another school, you need to drop out, and reapply to another school, doing all the steps over again (letters of recommendation, GRE/etc. scores, personal statement). Then you usually lose all progress on the way. If you finish a terminal master’s, or drop out of a doctoral program after getting your master’s, then you can usually apply to another place and a certain amount of credits due to your master’s can be applied without starting from scratch.
In the Netherlands the system is set up differently to start with: you’re sorted into different education systems much earlier. Your secondary school gives entrance to post-secondary education at one of three levels:
MBO - practical stuff, like mechanic
HBO - in English this is university, just not a very good university; slightly more practical
WO - university
Each has their own corresponding secondary school level. Because you are selected at an earlier age there are loads of mechanisms in place to allow children to move between different levels.
The final exams of the highest type of secondary school are your entrance exam to university. If you have not taken that particular exam you can sign up to take the exams separately. If you have taken a lower type of secondary education exam you can either complete your first year of HBO then move on to WO, or if you are over 21 you can present your experience to the university and ask to be admitted based on experience and a lower qualification.
Makes sense. There is plenty of organized support geared toward taking the 25 year old who repeated the eighth grade twice, took no AP classes, and then barely graduated high school with a C- average and then went to work flipping burgers for a few years and giving them the opportunity to prove that they currently have what it takes to succeed and let them get a bachelors degree by first completing an open enrollment community college program. I haven’t seen any meaningful programs/assistance/tracks designed to help the guy with a 2.1 from DeVry and say that, “What you did then doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you can do now, if you can handle grad school now we’d love to have you (and your money)! Prove you can handle it by getting at least a 3.2 in the first semester and you’re golden, else you’re out for a while and can try again in 2014.”
One option that seems obvious for someone who didn’t have a high undergrad GPA but needs a high one to get into grad school is for them to take random undergraduate courses here and there until their cumulative GPA is high enough, but I was looking at some program’s criteria (sorry I don’t currently have a cite), and it mentioned that the undergrad GPA that they use to evaluate you specifically excludes undergrad courses that you took after getting your bachelor’s degree (perhaps with the thought that the aspiring grad student would just take the easiest undergrad courses they could find now that they don’t have a degree program to match them against). Do people get a second bachelor’s degree in order to qualify for a grad program?
Any graduate program worth its salt will be looking at your grades in the classes for their discipline, not just the overall GPA. Taking random classes to pad your stats is not generally a viable option.
Generally speaking, the higher up the food chain you go, the less emphasis there is going to be on formal requirements and the more there will be on who you are and what you can persuade the relevant people that you are capable of, and how much you care about their specific discipline.
I would consider going back for a second undergraduate degree to be as “real” an option as anything else: lots of people have two bachelors. (though probably fewer as education costs skyrocket)
UK (well, specifically England and Wales, as Scotland has a different system)… we don’t ‘graduate’ as such from high school. We take two sets of exams –
> GCSEs at age 16, generally 8-10 subjects, after which you can leave school or stay on to do A Levels provided your school is happy with your GCSE grades
> A Levels at age 18, 3-5 subjects, the grades of which will dictate your access to university courses.
If you fail your exams, or never stay on to do your A Levels, there is nothing to stop you studying for these exams at any time of life by enrolling in a further education college. You’d probably have to pay to do the course, however.
My sister never stayed on to do A Levels, but was accepted onto a university degree course thanks to her 10 years’ professional experience in a relevant business, so often it is at the discretion of the course involved.
When I was doing the Bar Course in England, one of my fellow students was about 40, and he had never done his ALevels, been a Lorry driver and a builder for many years. He did eventually go to Uni and was good enough to get accepted into one of the sot academically challenging courses on England.
It depends on the type of program, and some programs DO accept courses taken after the bachelor’s degree that are college-level, but not for a particular degree. For example, many health-related graduate programs have science courses that may not have been required (or even possible to take) for a student majoring in humanities, arts, and literature. Many schools, then, let students apply and be admitted for programs where they only take the courses they need to apply to one of those health-related graduate programs.
Some people that I know with two undergraduate degrees got them at the same time, meaning that in the 4-5 years of undergrad, they crammed all the requirements needed for more than one major. These tended to be related programs (Animal Science/Biology, Chemistry/Chemical Engineering). Had I decided to finish bachelor’s in 4 instead of 3 years, I could’ve easily done the same.
Another thing that has not been mentioned for PhD programs is that they are very much tied to a major professor or primary investigator, who is the mentor of the doctoral student (see phdcomics.com ). In some cases, that mentor leaves the university for another college (sometimes completely out of the state). Depending on the research and how close they are to finishing it, some students move with their mentors to finish the program at the new university (“transferring”).
-Older people : when I took univ courses, there was a retired man studying with us, who, for some reason, wanted a bachelor degree in Physics. So it seems it’s possible. However, it was a cursus for working people, not a regular university schooling. I wouldn’t know if a 40 or 60 yo with a high school "degree"could just enroll along with the regular 18 yo crowd. Maybe yes, since the diploma at the end of high school is technically an university degree (for instance being caught cheating during it has the same consequences as doing it during university schooling, and the case is handled by the same “academic courts”) and allows joining an university.
-People who didn’t graduate from high school : There’s a specific exam that allow them to nevertheless join the Uni if they succeed at it. Alternatively, they can try to get the high school diploma (You don’t need to be just out of high school for this, and every year, at the time when the exam takes place, there’s always some 80 yo trying to get it shown on TV).
However, since France has the peculiarity of having, besides universities, superior schools providing education in more technical or professional fields, I would expect an adult wanting a second chance to rather join one of them. For instance, the “Insitut National des Arts et Métiers” in Paris, is well known for training working people as engineers and its successfull students are quite sought after.
In the UK anybody can go to university to do a degree at any age if they can afford it and have the right qualifications (or if their place of work funds them). I was 24 when I started, but I already had A levels (probably equivalent to a high school diploma). Friends on the same course as me who dropped out of high school/college and only had GCSE’s were able to do an ‘access course’ at a technical college, which lasted for a year I believe, and were then granted access to university.
My mother went back when she was forty something. Some people with the money just go and do courses they fancy doing. This is especially true with things like Open University.
On the other hand if you had a bad time of it as an undergrad and then try the post-bacc premed path don’t be surprised if med schools ignore the premed coursework and pay attention to just your GPA. Personal experience here, I did terrible as an undergrad. (I think I’ve mentioned this before but I blame them shoving a language down my figurative throat leading to clinical depression which ended up with me barely graduating. Amazing that I managed to pull that off given how screwed up I actually was.) Anyway I got my mind straight and went back in my mid 30’s and managed to pull off a 3.95 in premed course work and even score my age on the MCAT. End result? Med schools pretended to be interested right up until the moment I gave them the hundred bucks a pop for the secondary application and then a quick rejection. (Man was that ever a kick in the nuts.)
Are there any jurisdictions in the world where the opposite of #2 is true, e.g. if you don’t get a “Diploma Certificate of Mastery and Candidacy” by age 18, you are effectively barred from higher education because you can’t get a Diploma Certificate if you are over 18 and you have to have a Diploma Certificate to attend a university and there are no meaningful exceptions, meaning that you effectively need to look outside the jurisdiction for education (e.g. studying in a foreign land or at least in another subnational jurisdiction) because you’re disbarred at home?