A number of threads over the past month or so - none in particular, though - have made me realise that I don’t understand the American degree system. I see people talking about majors and minors, which I thought I understood, but I also see people saying that they were able to get a second full Batchelor’s degree in only an extra year by choosing their courses carefully.
Can the Dope set me straight?
In fields other than engineering only a small fraction of what you take in college actually applies to your major. There are alot of general classes you need to graduate
For example, I am doing a BS in chemistry. It requires 45 credit hours of chemistry, but 122 hours total. If I did the BA in chemistry I’d only need 25 hours of chemistry. The rest is foreign language, math, physics, arts & humanities, social & historical and general electives.
Hours, in case you don’t know, is credit hours. Most courses are 3-5 credit hours a semester, and you have two semesters a year excluding summer.
So if a person gets two bachelor degrees it could be a situation where there was alot of overlap. I would say that about 90-100 credit hours is similiar between science degrees. For example if a person get a BS in biology at my school they not only need 45 hours of biology they also need 13 hours of chemistry. The math, physics, foreign language, A&H, S&H, etc electives are the same for the BS in biology and chemistry. So just by doing a BS in biology you’ve already completed about 90 hours of a BS in chemistry degree. if a person wanted a BA in chemistry that’d be even easier, they would just need to take alot of art and social classes, some extra foreign language and 10 hours of chemistry.
At my university, it works like this:
The college that you are in (Liberal Arts, Science, Engineering, Nursing, etc.) has a required “core” of courses that everyone in that college must take. It always includes some math, some science, and some liberal arts.
Next, you pick at least one major. The major requires a lot of more specific courses. For a major in biology you will take several biology classes, several chemistry classes, and some physics. For a major in English you take literature and linguistics classes chosen from a very specific list.
Inside of a college, all of the majors result in the same Bachelor’s degree. All Liberal Arts majors get you a B.A. All science majors get you a B.S.
You can pick up as many majors as you want within a college (practically, three is the max for a B.A. and two are the max for a B.S.), and you will still get just one degree.
However, if you decide to pick up two majors in different schools (as I did) then you have to take not only the requirements for both majors, but the requirements for each college’s core. It’s a lot more work and rightfully results in two different degrees.
I took a B.S. from the College of Science, in biology, and a B.A. from the College of Liberal Arts, in English. Though the cores were very different I was allowed to “double dip” with some courses, which saved a little bit of time. My math courses counted for both, and then four of the English courses satisfied the liberal arts requirements for my biology degree, and two of the biology classes satisfied the science requirement for the English degree. All the same, I finished both degrees in five years, with summers included.
A minor cannot qualify you for a degree by itself. It is a small number of classes (five in Liberal Arts, six with four laboratories in Science) that sort of specializes your main field. I also took a minor in psychology.
How is engineering different? It was my experience that at most universities, all majors (including engineering) had to satisfy undergraduate requirements in the humanities. There was always much gnashing of teeth among the gearheads about why they had to take English composition. After working with them in industry for 13 years, it became apparent most of them skipped that class.
I received a BS from the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University. Technical Journalism with a Computer Science minor.
Also, many high school students these days take at least a couple AP (Advanced Placement) exams. If your scores are sufficiently high, many universities will accept your AP exam in place of a required course.
For example, by taking AP Calculus in high school – and getting a 5 of 5 on the exam (sometimes 4 of 5) – you will have credit for that class upon entering University.
If skills are demonstrably high upon entrance, many Universities also allow students to “test out” of required courses like foreign language and English Composition. No course credit is given, but the requirement is waived for that student.
These programs allow some students to “free up” their schedule for non-required work. BTW, when you do two degrees simultaneously, it’s called a “double major.”
Bear in mind that even relatively specialized programs in the US (Engineering would be an example) are still rather general as compared to the British system (where, unless I’m mistaken, you’re not allowed to study a subject unless you’ve proven basic proficiency? At least that’s the impression I get from Harry Potter 
) Almost every American university has something called “Core” or “General Education” requirements, that require you to do some study of all the major disciplines.
In my experience generally a BA degree requires about 25-40 hours of your major. A BS generally requires about 40-50 hours out of the 120-130 be devoted to your major. However in engineering it seems that about 80-90 hours of the major is engineering based classes.
And note that I made some little pains to point out that I was talking about my university specifically. This B.A. in chemistry of which Wesley Clark speaks is a foreign notion to me…
And yes, test outs. I tested out of the composition requirement (held by all colleges) and out of my foreign language requirement (held by all colleges except those pesky engineers). This is not an unusual experience.
At my university, also, one is only allowed to take minors in a school from which one is taking a major (and therefore, also that college’s core). The one exception is that the colleges of Science and Liberal Arts can trade around.
Also note what Wesley Clark said–the credit hours involved in a major are usually rather fewer than those involved in the core.
A major is your primary area of study. There is a prescribed list of courses that must be taken to fulfill the requirements. For example, my major is communications and journalism. To graduate, I must have between 11 and 13 courses in that area, including required courses and electives.
A minor is a secondary area of study. Not all majors require them, but some do. I’m a history minor, so I had to take 6 courses. Fortunately, two of them were already general-education courses, so that’s really only 4 additional courses.
In addition to major and minor, I had to take one math, one speech, one writing, and the two history courses as “core” courses. I also had to take a computer course (for logic and rational thinking), three humanities courses, three science courses, two geopolitical courses, and two behavior courses. I also had a “diversity” requirement that was met by taking sociology, which, of course, fits in with the behavior requirement.
If I went for a second bachelor’s degree in history, I wouldn’t have to repeat any of that. I’d have to take an additional six courses, which I could easily do in a year’s time. Most of the people I know who are going for a second bachelor’s are doing so in a related field. A few do so to meet teaching requirements; one person in one of my classes already has a bachelor’s degree, but he needs the education credits needed to get a teaching certificate, so he may as well get a second bachelor’s.
Robin
So these two farmers are talking one day.
Farmer1 How’s your kid doing in college?
Farmer2 Fine, but I sure don’t understand these degrees they award
Farmer1 It’s simple, he goes to school for 4 years and he gets a BS. You know what BS stands for don’t ya?
Farmer2 Well sure
Farmer1 Well if he stays in school for some more years he gets an MS. That stands for more of the same
Farmer2 Got it
Farmer1 Finally if he stays in school even longer he will get a PHD.
Farmer2 What does that stand for?
Farmer1 Piled higher and deeper
Ducks and runs
I received an A.B. (yes, that’s actually the abbreviation used at my school for it) in Linguistics. Since linguistics is a science, I’d have to say that not all science degrees are B.S. degrees.
For the linguistics undergraduate program, there are two options: the major and the minor. The major requires between 48 and 68 credit hours (UCD is on the quarter system, except the law school which is on the semester–and perhaps another department also uses the semester system). The minor requires 24 credit hours. The spread in the major requirement depends on what courses the student chooses to satisfy the linguistics program; some of those courses have prerequisites which must be taken first.
Essentially, a major is an in-depth study of the subject when compared to the minor which is a general overview.
A much smaller percentage of free credit hours is available in most engineering programs. For example, at UVa (my alma mater), here’s the electrical engineering program:
http://www.virginia.edu/registrar/records/ugradrec//chapter10/chapter10-4.htm#electrical
128 credits are required, and only 9 are set aside for “unrestricted electives”, i.e. classes outside of engineering. There are several humanities classes along the way, but those are all specialized classes within the engineering college itself. It would be tough to have a second major, or even a minor without having a pretty severe course load. Of course, if the minor is in another technical field (e.g. physics), it would be easier.
In contrast, the English program is much less demanding (in terms of required credits, at least):
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/under/major.html
It looks like you could get by with a minimum of 30 hours of English classes (although the prerequites for some of them may force you to take a couple more), with another 90 hours or more free for other classes.
Arjuna34
Arjuna34
Sattua writes:
> All Liberal Arts majors get you a B.A. All science majors get you a B.S.
It is much more complicated than this. Some colleges give everyone a B.A. Some older ones give everyone an A.B. (i.e., with the Latin words for “bachelor” and “arts” reversed). Some give everyone a B.S. Some at least used to give every “ordinary” student a B.A. (or maybe an A.B.), but they had a small number of students who came in through odd programs (night classes and such) who would be given a B.S., regardless of their majors. The most common case is that all science majors get a B.S. and all other liberal arts (um, you do realize that science majors are usually considered liberal arts, don’t you?) majors get a B.A. However, the students who are in non-liberal arts subjects (engineering, (elementary and secondary) teaching, nursing, music performance, etc.) would get degrees with special names like B.S. in Engineering, B.S. in Education, etc. Some colleges give most people B.A.'s, but if you take certain courses in addition to your studies in your major, you would get a B.A. instead. Some colleges give most people B.S.'s, but if you take certain courses in addition to your studies in your major, you would get a B.S. There are probably other variations too. Like everything else in American education, there is a lot more variation than in most foreign educational systems.
Wesley Clark writes:
> In fields other than engineering only a small fraction of what you take in college
> actually applies to your major.
Again, this is oversimplified. In liberal arts subjects (i.e., natural and social science and humanities), somewhere around half of the courses one will take in college are in the subject one is majoring in. In some colleges it’s noticeably less than this percentage, while in other subjects it’s noticeably more. There is also a lot of personal variation (determined by the student’s own choice) in the percentage of courses in one’s major at many colleges.
Typically, engineering degrees require one to take more courses than liberal arts degrees. Indeed, at some colleges, one will be told that an engineering degree will usually require five years of study, not four, although a particularly energetic student could just barely take enough courses each year to finish in four years. Part of the reason that engineering majors take more courses is that one is often expected to take nearly as many courses in the equivalent science as the science majors take, and then one has to take engineering courses beyond that. (The equivalent science for mechanical and electrical engineering is physics and the equivalent science for chemical engineering is chemistry.) For this reason, the percentage of courses outside one’s engineering major (and the other required science and math courses) tend to be a larger percentage of one’s studies than for liberal arts majors.
There is a huge amount of variation between different colleges, different majors, and different students at the same college in the U.S., probably more so than is the case in any other country. In any thread like this, it should always be emphasized that one should take everything that any poster writes with a grain of salt. Many people do not realize that their educational experience might not generalize to other people’s experiences in the U.S.
I wouldn’t say that’s entirely accurate. Don’t a lot of the classes you have to take directly support your chemistry work, to the extent that if you didn’t take those other courses, you couldn’t handle advanced chemistry classes? Since chemistry is a physical science I’m mainly thinking math here.
For the liberal arts people at the other end of campus, I’d say that most of what they do supports their majors in a similar way. If your major is German lit, say, you will generally be expected to compliment the German courses with additional classes in other aspects of the humanities, and, of course, some lower division science courses so you’re not totally ignorant of that.
To add to this - the foreign reader should be aware that when people speak of “hours” or “credits” in various subjects, some institutions use a quarter system rather than a semester system, with 3 quarters in a typical student’s year of study rather than 2 semesters (many students are not present during the summer quarter). Somebody mentioned that a program was on quarters, but didn’t emphasize this point. People who may be interested in reading a student’s transcript are aware of this and multiply credits from an institution operating on a quarter system by 2/3 to compare them to those from an institution operating on semesters. The requirements at institutions on the quarter system will have correspondingly higher numbers.
If the foreign reader is wondering how a degree can actually mean anything with all this variation, it should be mentioned there are boards of accreditation that certify college and university degree programs as meeting standards. This is intended to assure that somebody who has a bachelor’s degree in, say, chemistry, from an accredited institution will actually know something about chemistry. The board does not impose detailed requirements on the institution concerning how they organize their academic calendar or their curriculum to accomplish this, or the exact nomenclature they use for their degree. Unfortunately, even some employers seem to think there is a larger significance to a “BA” vs. a “BS” then there actually is.
Then there are those of us who floated through college as “perpetual undergrads,” changing majors and colleges whenever the mood struck. (This was back in the 70s, when it was allowed and economically feasible to do stuff like this.) By the time I finally finished, my university gave me a BA in Liberal Studies, which was basically an Anthropology major with dual minors in Sociology and European History. What else was I going to do but teach? 
::shrugs:: That’s the degree I have.
At C (no hyphen) M (no U), most of the sciences have both a B.S. option and a B.A. option. Practically speaking, no one treats them any differently outside of the university. Even entering grad school (for science), no one questioned me on why I have a B.A. instead of a B.S.
As far as the requirements, I think Wesley Clark was on the money. By opting for the B.A., it opened up the option for me to get two minors. The total number of credits was the same, but I needed fewer “core credits” to get my B.A. Generally speaking, B.A. degrees allow one to diversify.
Ironically enough, one of my brothers has a B.S. in Business.
However, I see more of a correlation between MA and MS meaning liberal arts* or science. I have never heard of someone getting a MA in, say, Biology.
With the PhD, it’s impossible to tell. However, there are now some other doctorates. There’s EdD (education), PharmD (Pharmacy), EngD (Engineering), and SciD (science), to name a few.
*Sorry, Wendell I have never heard of Science being referred to as a “liberal art.” Every time I see a combined college of arts and sciences, it is referred to as a “College of Arts and Sciences.”
I am enlightened. Thank you.
I’ll also meantion that my undergrad institution operated briefly on a 4-1-4 (two 4 month semesters separated by a 1 month “minimester”). That was many years ago, when this system was more popular than it is now, I believe. In our case, the minimester was a time during which you were to do a special project outside your field of study. You had to do two of them to graduate, but there were no academic credits attached to them. A very “liberal arts” idea. At some insitutions, the 1 month interval (usually January) was used for special seminars which did carry academic credit.
Let me quote from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Liberal arts means “academic disciplines, such as languages, literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, and science, that provide information of general cultural concern.”
In other words, it’s not subjects specific to a particular profession, like engineering, teaching, nursing, etc. This is the way I’ve heard the term used. Yes, occasionally one hears the distinction between liberal arts and the sciences, but, one again, this just shows what a huge variation there is in the content and even in the terminology of education in the U.S.