This is bullshit. Charles has a perfectly legitimate Masters, including having done archaeology field work, from one of the foremost universities in the world. He did the same coursework as any other student, what justifies you calling it “free-candy”?
Uh, cite? The only reference I can find to him having a Master’s is his Oxbridge degree, which is awarded pretty much automatically a few years after getting your Bachelor’s—no field work or coursework required. If he’s got a different degree from another university, please enlighten me.
I thought Charlie was a highly edjucated fella.
“I suppose that the Prince cannot be blamed for his poor education. He may have been at Trinity College Cambridge, his 2.2 degree is the current euphemism for a fail (it seems that he even failed to learn the dates of the enlightenment).”
To be fair, that page is hardly unbiased and it’s also incorrect. The Enlightenment is of course a vague concept, but most place its start in the 18th century. The Royal Society of 1622 was a product of the Scientific Revolution which was a much different thing than the Enlightenment, though it is certainly the thing that kicked the Enlightenment off. Of course, there is debate and this is a very gross simplification, but I think it’s helpful to look at the Enlightenment as a political era as opposed to the scientific era of the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution was about a quest for knowledge and didn’t particularly care about religion or politics. It didn’t care about the organization of society so much as the quest for truth. The Enlightenment is what cared about destroying all of the old social edifices and inventing new ones. The scientists didn’t care, they wanted to know why helium went up instead of down, not whether God instituted human rights or not. The Scientific Revolution was all about the hard sciences and the Enlightenment was about the soft ones. To be honest, the Enlightenment kind of put a damper on Scientific progress, the 18th century saw a slowing of scientific thought and many Enlightenment thinkers (particularly Rousseau) derided hard sciences as impersonal and removing man from nature (Getting back to a ‘natural,’ implicitly ‘pre-Christian’ state was a major theme in Enlightenment thought.) The Scientific Revolution concerned itself with ‘How do things work?’ while the Enlightenment concerned itself with ‘How can we use this knowledge to destroy church and state and create a new world?’ The first was science for the sake of science and the second was science in service to political ends. They are different concepts with different results.
I can definitely see Charles as a pre-Enlightenment thinker-him being a Royalist is a pretty good indicator. He would have fit in very well during the Scientific Revolution when it was a lot of relatively wealthy men puttering about on their estates just trying to see what makes the world tick.
Anyway, this is a major digression. I apologize.
Is that special for Oxbridge? Because I had to work for my Masters degrees, it’d be annoying if people at a different University got theirs for free.
Anyway, traditionally, Norwegian royalty gets their further education/ bachelors from the Norwegian equivalent of West Point. King Olav V took further education in economics and law at Oxford. His son, the current King, Harald V, studied social sciences, history and economics at Oxford. Their pages do not list any more than that they completed their studies.
His son, the Crown Prince Haakon Magnus also did a BA in political science at Berkley, and a Masters in Political Science at the London School of Economics and Politics, his thesis on international aid. He has also completed the academic part of the foreign services diplomat training school. Which is said to be fairly rigorous.
For what its worth, I read that there were considerable efforts to keep him anonymous at Berkley, especially from examiners.
Yes, it’s special for Oxbridge (and maybe one or two other ancient universities). And yes, a lot of people find it very annoying that the Master’s degrees awarded by these prestigious universities are essentially worthless. I guess they are worried (rightly so IMHO) that employers who don’t know any better will preferentially offer jobs and promotions to candidates with these faux credentials.
In defence of Oxford and Cambridge, their practice of automatically conferring the M.A. long predates other universities’ use of the M.A. as a real degree requiring coursework and/or a dissertation. But nowadays the practice is highly anomalous and anachronistic. There have been calls for them to stop this, but they’re hanging on out of tradition.
As an aside, a 2.2 is not a failure. A 2.1 is the general minimum for post-grad work, so an American equivalent might be a 3.0 GPA. A 2.2 necessarily falls below that. I think that we would probably say it’s the equivalent to having a 2.5-3.0 GPA in the American system. Which means that he wasn’t a great student, but not a ‘failure’ either. Simply a pretty average student. Nowadays, a 2.2 is considered a bit worse because grade inflation has effectively made every student a 2.1 or higher, but in the 70s, far fewer people had 2.1s. We don’t have pre-90s data, but in 95, 45% of students had a 2.1 or higher, last year, it was 75%. The expectation of getting a post-grad degree has inflated grades to pretty ludicrous levels, but what are you gonna do?
It may not be required, but he did it anyway. You’re denigrating his proper B degree along with the automatic MA.
No I’m not; I never said anything about his undergraduate degree. This thread isn’t even about undergraduate degrees.
Most countries, actually. Given that she got the degree at 23yo and the length studies had at the time, that’s undergrad.
Felipe VI of Spain has a Masters in International Relations from Georgetown. It’s not listed in the English wikipedia, but it is in the Spanish one and I remember the blurbs from when he studied there.
IIRC until the last 15 years or so (Bologna process) undergraduate degrees in the Netherlands were the equivalent of an Anglo-American bachelors & masters combined into a single degree and the only higher degree was a research doctorate.