Of course, O’Levels, taken at 16 was the equivalent of High School and A-Level at 18 was and is equivalent to first couple of years of college in the US.
Not exactly. You wouldn’t get college credit for them here or anything.
True. I am talking about the general level/standard.
I do think the US system is superior.
Thing is, that system is a lot more common than the American system. Once trivium and quadrivium got tossed and profession-oriented training took its place, most systems were a lot more closed than the American one. My German colleagues were able to get Doctorates in Organic Chemistry after their Masters in Organic Chemistry and their Bachelors in Organic Chemistry, a degree of specialization which sounded crazy to us Spaniards and Italians, but we had to choose specific combinations of university+degree and we had several years of common all-required courses followed by a shorter specialization period (under Bologna, the first part now gives a Grado/Degree while the second one is your Masters): a lot more focused than the American model. Once I chose my degree, I knew what I was going to take for the next three years; once I chose my specialty, the last two were all laid down.
When I wrote the following:
> The answer is that all universities in all countries started with just a single course
> of study.
I didn’t realize that what I was saying could be easily misunderstood. I didn’t mean that any individual university from its founding only offered a single course of study. I meant that the first universities in all countries (i.e., back in the early eighteenth century or before) all had a single course of study. They had been that way since universities first existed in the Middle Ages. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was standard to have a variety of courses of studies (i.e., of majors). Of course a university that opened in 1977, say, anywhere would have a variety of possible majors from its opening.
njtt writes:
> Incidentally, when you start talking about hierarchy between different institutions,
> the American system is a lot more stratified now than the British, and American
> students and parents care a lot more more about which university they go to than
> British ones do. There is a lot more difference between Harvard and Podunk State
> (at least in the minds of American students, parents, and employers), and a lot
> more gradations of difference, than there is between Oxbridge and, say Leeds
> Trinity (a former college of education that has recently been upgraded to
> university status). (I speak as a parent whose daughter has just recently finished
> the application processes for several Ivy Leagues and other high status US
> universities.)
Well, yes . . . and no. Yes, there is more difference between the quality of, say, Harvard and Bowie State University than the difference between the quality of, say, Oxford and Leeds Trinity. On the other hand, there are dozens of universities in the U.S. with very good undergraduate and graduate departments. Graduating from any of them as an undergraduate would be look very good on, say, your application to the top graduate school in your field. There are dozens of smaller colleges which offer just undergraduate education (but very good undergraduate education) where also it would look very good on an application to a top graduate school to have gone there.
The thing to know about American colleges and universities in comparison to British ones is that they cover a very wide spectrum, and there are a couple of thousand of them. Yes, some of them aren’t particularly good. There are also many of them close to the top that are extremely good, hardly distinguishable from each other.
William & Mary was never solely or predominantly a school of theology. It’s charter of 1693 states it is to be a "College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences.”
Some of its most influential graduates in the 1700s, such as Thomas Jefferson, never had any aspirations to the ministry. 
George Washington received his surveyor’s license from W&M.
I will add that Jefferson’s course of study was dubbed “philosophy” but the subject was more varied than a philosophy major would be today; it was a sort of liberal arts education in prototypical form:
“He was instructed in natural philosophy (physics, metaphysics, and mathematics) and moral philosophy (rhetoric, logic, and ethics)”
http://www.wm.edu/about/history/tjcollege/tjcollegelife/?svr=web
Most education at William and Mary around the time of Jefferson and Washington was either something like a single general liberal arts curriculum or something like an Anglican seminary:
http://www.megacz.com/misc/berdahl.talk.html
Yes, George Washington got a survey’s license at 17 through some program connected with William and Mary, but that doesn’t mean that he got a degree from the university. William and Mary, like the other early American universities and like Oxford and Cambridge, was mostly a place where clergy got their training and where the sons of rich families got a general education. There were no majors in surveying or anything like that. I’m not sure what program existed to give out surveyor’s licenses. It certainly wasn’t considered a degree. William and Mary was the only university in Virginia. Perhaps it was decided that it would be a useful place to put a short course in surveying. It would be like a modern university sponsoring a weeklong conference or having an non-credit adult education program or running a summer program for high school students on its campus. Those aren’t degree programs.
You’re quite right that William & Mary offered non-degree certificate programs in practical subjects, and there was also the Indian school which educated Native Americans beginning around 1700. Further, the Charter itself divides the college into three schools: the Grammar School, the Philosophy School and the Divinity School. It is said to be the first American college with a “full faculty” as opposed to being a divinity school as Harvard was at the time.
So when you stated:
Really this is incorrect. William & Mary, the second university founded in the American Colonies (it wasn’t the United States yet, natch) always offered multiple courses of study since it’s very founding.
Unless I’ve quite misunderstood you.
So William and Mary had three schools, one for grammar, one for philosophy, and one for divinity. The grammar school was presumably the same as what’s now called a grammar school - i.e., basically a high school. The grammar they taught was presumably Latin grammar. It was presumed that before you could learn anything else at a university level, you had to know how to read Latin. Once you learned Latin, you could choose to either be an Anglican priest or study “philosophy,” which at that time encompassed pretty much all academic study.
So William and Mary had three schools, one more or less a high school to teach Latin before you could learn anything else, one a divinity school, and one a place to study liberal arts, although it was not split up into departments and presumably there were no majors. So I wasn’t quite accurate in saying that there weren’t multiple courses of study. William and Mary had two courses of study, and there was another that had to be taken before you could do either of them. Still, that’s considerably different from the dozens of majors offered at universities today.
I believe that’s right about the grammar school; I know TJ never attended and that he was versed in latin & greek when he arrived.
Law was added around the time of the American revolution and that became the third distinct “course of study.” You’re right it certainly was different from the modern major system.
However to bring it all back to the original question - it appears that Oxford also taught in the Enlightenment-era broad-based manner until subject-based honors school were formed beginning in 1802 and granted degrees on the basis of proficiency exams in specific subject matter.
I’m not overly familiar with the history of Oxford though, so please correct me if that’s wrong.
The University of Virginia claims to be the first university in the US to offer elective courses which I guess is the first step away from “everybody studies everything” (it opened for classes in 1825). Harvard first abolished required courses in 1869, but, finding that the students were a bit undirected, began using the modern major system in 1910 – a combination of basic coursework in many subjects, and specialization in one area. As far as this New York Times article describes it on page 2, Harvard invented it.