US education system baffles a Brit

[bordelond]

*Originally posted by rackensack *
Wendell Wagner’s contention to the contrary notwithstanding, fraternities and sororities exert an influence on the social life of many institutions far beyond what their membership levels might lead you to expect. This is particularly the case at large state universities in the Southern U.S.; indeed, the farther south and larger the school, the more likely it is to be dominated by the Greek social system. I spent most of my high school years in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where my mother worked on campus at the University of Arkansas, and my father was finishing up his B.S. degree. This was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in many ways the nadir of popularity of the Greek system, yet the fraternities and sororities still exerted a hegemonic power over the entire campus. I was put off by the whole thing to such a degree that the lack of a Greek social system or football team became very high priorities for me in looking for a college. There are lots of places (indeed, probably most colleges and universities, where the Greek system is not that important, but at the campuses where it is big, it’s HUGE).

I can agree with your “where it’s big, it’s big” sentiment, but I have to say that from my POV, Wendell Wagner is closer to the mark.

According to your “farther south” logic, Lousiana State University – my alma mater – would have a Greek-dominated social scene. That was not the case as of decade ago. Also, there was considerable (not to say wholesale) intermingling between the Greek and non-Greek social scenes.

Of course, the view can vary considerably depending on what school is in question, and also whether or not one is or has been a member of a sorority/fraternity.

…

tomndebb – malden’s got a point. Boston College, College of Charleston, Dartmouth, etc. … they all grant Master’s degrees and doctorates. Perhaps keeping the “College” in the name is merely traditional?

[bordelond]

*Originally posted by Wendell Wagner *
**rackensack writes:

> Wendell Wagner’s contention to the contrary notwithstanding,
> fraternities and sororities exert an influence on the social life of
> many institutions far beyond what their membership levels
> might lead you to expect.

… it is extremely important in some universities, but not in the majority of them (and even there, it’s more a matter of a group of “socially connected” students who run the student activities, while many other students just ignore that stuff).**

This is an important point. While Greek organizations sponsor many regularly recurring, university-sanctioned, and well-advertised social functions, these selfsame functions don’t necessarily make up the entire gamut of a university’s social scenes (YMMV).

Further making my point concerning Greek influence over LSU’s social scene(s), LSU’s student government was not Greek-run. Greek representation in student government was roughly proportional to the ratio of Greek/non-Greek students in the entire university. Furthermore, LSU’s student government association itself organized and sponsored many university-sanctioned, well-advertised social functions, just as the Greek system traditionally does.

[zuma]

Wow. I’d never have guessed that Brit students don’t have yearbooks. Are yearbooks purely a US phenomenon? Getting the yearbook at the end of the year and spending the last week of school gathering signatures was a lot of fun. Silly, yes, but fun.

[Harli]

The scholastic system in Canada is similar to that of the US school system.
The province of Ontario even had a few major differences when I was in highschool.

We graduated after completing our required credits up to grade 12. Then we could either go to college and obtain a diploma in a field study of our choice, or enter the work world right away.
If we wanted to continue on to university, where we could obtain a 3 year degree, or a 4 year Honours degree, then we would have to complete the required OAC (Ontario Academic Credits), or grade 13, credits. From what I understood, an Honours degree was required for graduate work, such as obtaining a Masters, then PhD. I thought this was also required for teachers’ college, but I have been hearing different stories lately (going to get it checked out soon, as I’m reconsidering teachers’ college). The OAC requirements have been taken out of our school system, as Ontario was the only province, I believe, that still required these courses. Due to this, over the next couple of years, there will be a huge number of students applying to both colleges and universities in Ontario, making it quite competetive.
I should also note that colleges are more “practical” in the information taught, where universities are more “theoretical”.

As for prom and homecoming, in my highschool, prom was open to all grades, and usually coincided with Valentine’s Day. It was called a “Formal” however. Maybe it was just my perception, but there didn’t seem to be that big of a deal to it. Buy a pretty dress, play hookey that afternoon to get your hair done, maybe rent a limo, dinner, dance, and often a hotel room afterparty. I didn’t go until my final year of highschool where my position on student council required it. As for homecoming…nada. No such thing at my highschool. There was the first game of the season, and pep rallys and such, but no popularity contest for prom king and queen.

So there’s the Canadian input.

[Harli]

Oh, and yes, yearbooks are a big deal here too. Graduates get to write their quote to be included with their picture. People would work on their quote for months. It’s funny to look back now and see “Tru Luv 4Evr” when they broke up before they even got to graduation.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

*Originally posted by Neurotik *
**.

7. A sorority house is the house that the sorority lives in. Sororities are the female versions of fraternities. They only exist at universities and colleges. Both fraternities and sororities comprise the “Greek system,” so called because the organizations are identified by two or three greek letters.

**

Fraternities and sororities were once commonly found at high schools, too, although I think by now most school districts have prohibited them. I’m just mentioning it in case the OP sees them mentioned in something written long ago.

[Yossarian]

Two comments:

Universities and Colleges. It’s been my experience that it really doesn’t matter [anymore?] what a college/university calls itself. There are many Universities that only offer Bachelor’s degrees, many that offer Bachelor’s degrees and also have some Master’s programs, and many that offer all three degrees at all levels. Likewise for colleges, as several have noted. For example, I am currently faculty at a University that until recently had no graduate program–and has only recently added its first. Yet it is still a “University” because the school petitioned to be renamed such, and the Univ. of North Carolina board of trustees approved it. Trustees set the name, and approve/disapprove programs, but in the end, degree-granting power is vested by the accrediting authorities (SACS, in our case) and that’s the bottom line.

Similarly, many Universites aren’t subdivided into “Colleges”, but rather into “Schools”. They’re still the same thing for the most part, each directed by an Academic Dean and overseen by the Universitie’s VP or VC of Academic Affairs (or some similar title).

Greek-Lettered Socities. In addition to your run-of-the-mill frats and sororities and the aforementioned Phi Beta Kappa honors socitey, there are numerous other greek-lettered honors socities for overall academic achievement (eg., Alpha Chi, which similar to PBK, but usually at smaller schools w/o a PBK chapter), for research (eg., Sigma Xi), or for individual disciplies (eg., Phi Alpha Theta, Sigma Gamma Epsilon).

[Yossarian]

Two comments:

Universities and Colleges. It’s been my experience that it really doesn’t matter [anymore?] what a college/university calls itself. There are many Universities that only offer Bachelor’s degrees, many that offer Bachelor’s degrees and also have some Master’s programs, and many that offer all three degrees at all levels. Likewise for colleges, as several have noted. For example, I am currently faculty at a University that until recently had no graduate program–and has only recently added its first. Yet it is still a “University” because the school petitioned to be renamed such, and the Univ. of North Carolina board of trustees approved it. Trustees set the name, and approve/disapprove programs, but in the end, degree-granting power is vested by the accrediting authorities (SACS, in our case) and that’s the bottom line.

Similarly, many Universites aren’t subdivided into “Colleges”, but rather into “Schools”. They’re still the same thing for the most part, each directed by an Academic Dean and overseen by the University’s VP or VC of Academic Affairs (or some similar title).

Greek-Lettered Socities. In addition to your run-of-the-mill frats and sororities and the aforementioned Phi Beta Kappa honors socitey, there are numerous other greek-lettered honors socities for overall academic achievement (eg., Alpha Chi, which is similar to PBK, but usually at smaller schools w/o a PBK chapter), for research (eg., Sigma Xi), or for individual disciplies (eg., Phi Alpha Theta, Sigma Gamma Epsilon).

[booklover]

Junior High/Middle School/Intermediate School are roughly equivalent. In my experience, junior high is 6th and 7th grades, middle school is 6th, 7th, and 8th, and intermediate school is 7th and 8th.

Cheerleaders. In my high school, we had Flags–girls who were less athletically inclined than cheerleaders and twirled large flags in the school colors, Poms–named after their pom-poms (those big fluffy things), and Cheerleaders, who performed more athletic stunts. Poms and Cheerleaders had both a varsity and junior varsity division. Junior varsity is usually for freshmen, sophomores and less talented juniors or seniors.

High School graduation requirements My school district was pretty strict about what you had to take–I know that 3 years of science, 3 years of math and 4 of English were required. We also had to take at least one course in “Fine Arts” (drawing, painting, etc) and one in “Practical Arts” (shop, etc.). A number of school districts are now requiring that you pass certain subject tests in order to graduate.

** “U.S. System of Education”** The phrase we’re grappling for here is the U.S. Department of Education, which does set some federally mandated standards. However, each state, county, and then district has its own guidelines, funding, etc., which leads to wildly divergent education efforts across the country. Check out Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol to learn more about how school district variations affect the education students receive.

[Bean_Counter]

*Originally posted by rackensack *
**Well, my alma mater (Hendrix College) has always had a very clear identity as an undergraduate liberal arts college, granting on Bachelor of Arts degrees (even in the sciences, you still get a B.A. instead of a B.S. – make of that what you will). In the last few years, however, much to my chagrin, they’ve started offering a Masters of Arts in Accounting, of all things. I understand the market-driven reasons for it, but that doesn’t make me like any better.
**

The reason they started offering a Masters in Accounting is that they recently changed the requirements to sit for the CPA exam. One of the requirements is now 150 hours of college credits, effectively a Master’s Degree. If you school had not started this, an accounting student would had graduated from your college and still go somewhere else to get the required credits necessary in order to sit for the exam. Not too much of an incentive to go to Hendrix for an accounting degree in this one-stop-shopping world of ours if they did not offer it.

[Walloon]

There are three types of college fraternities: social, professional, and honorary.

Phi Beta Kappa, the original college Greek-letter organization (1776), is an honorary fraternity, awarding membership to those who have shown distinguished academic achievement in the liberal arts. Its members include six of the eight current Supreme Court justices, and presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. It set the lofty practice of using the initials of a Greek motto as the name of the organization (in this case the Greek phrase Philosophia Biouy Kubernetes,
“Love of wisdom, the guide of life”).

Although the prevalance of college social fraternities and sororities may seem overwhelming at some schools, only about 10 percent of American undergraduate college students (i.e., those working for a bachelor’s degree, usually ages 18 to 23) are members of social fraternities or sororities.

Most social fraternities (and I am including sororities here, many of which are actually called “women’s fraternities”) have their own residential houses, where the members live while going to college. At American colleges and universities, most undergradutes spend their first one or two years on campus, living in school-owned residence halls; and their third and fourth years living off campus, in privately owned residence halls, apartments, rented houses, or fraternity/sorority houses. Sorority houses are generally quite attractive places to live (not surprising for houses run entirely by women), while fraternity houses can range from palaces to dumps (not surprising either). Sorority women themselves tend to be among the most attractive and outgoing on campus (personal opinion!).

All sororities and most fraternities engage in philanthropic endeavors, with the members volunteering their time, and organizing fundraisers, for things like cancer research, tutoring underpriviledged children, or building and rehabing housing for poor families.

Professional fraternities are also for undergraduates, but are intended for students in a specific course of study; for example, agriculture, engineering, or business. Many professional fraternities have their own residential houses, and operate otherwise much like social fraternities.

For more about college fraternities, see the North-American Fraternity Conference (formerly known as the National Interfraternity Conference). For more about college sororities, see the National Panhellenic Conference. For a photo history of one typical college social fraternity, see here.

[Mehitabel]

Kid from stereotypical big-city crime-ridden bankrupt public school system weighing in here. :rolleyes: Da Bronx in the mean seventies and early eighties, when even the President said to my city “Drop Dead”. (OK, he was paraphrased).

I’ll deal with the questions that haven’t been answered from this perspective yet:

2. What is a “homecoming queen”?

My HS (9-12) was a magnet or “examination” school, one of three in NYC. All right, it was the Bronx HS of Science.

No football, no fields in which to play football, no heat after noon on Fridays, no extra paper, old textbooks, no new sports equipment, no lockers, no malt shops, no parking lot, no place to hang out after school before the kids from the Villa Avenue gang would start on you.

So, no homecoming to be queen of! Although we did have queens and were ethnically very diverse–mostly immigrant kids and lower-middle-class strivers like me, with a smattering of wealthier Manhattan and Riverdale kids who chose us over Stuyvesant High.

4. What is a “yearbook”?

But hey, we had yearbooks, very nice ones too.

5. Is a majorette the same as a cheerleader? And what is their significance?

Beats me. We had only four teams of any renown: chess, debate, math, and Ultimate Frisbee. There was a desultory basketball team that did have cheerleaders, but the squad was actually a sort of social club for the African-American girls and most everybody, of every race, totally ignored the sports aspect of school. I attended two games my whole time there, one out of curiousity and one on a date.

6. What do you have to do to “graduate” from high school? (In Britain the only graduates are university graduates). Is graduation an exam, like our A-levels?

No, as others have said, but at academically-inclined schools like mine the SATs were a MAJOR rite of passage. Almost everyone went to college, and in those days of better financial aid a lot of us got to go to the best ones. I didn’t have the average for Harvard and MIT but I did get into Wellesley…

7. What is a “sorority house”?

…which surprisingly doesn’t have sororities. There are two or three ‘societies’, non-residential gatherings of those inclined towards Shakespeare, poetry, or science. They have little on-campus houses that they can meet in and hire them out for parties (the houses, that is).

Harvard, perhaps the most famous American university, also forbids fraternities and sororities. Again, there’s societies and clubs you can join.

MIT, which is (unfairly IMO) not known for its social whirl, does have them, partly to help with a chronic housing shortage. I mainly socialized with Greeks during my time at Wellesley (which is an all-women’s college). But there was plenty to do without setting foot in a frat house, although the frat parties were considered somewhat cooler. The guys I knew socialized with anybody they liked, and they certainly didn’t lord it over the rest of the students.

8. Why are school “proms” so important? Are they just end of term parties?

YPMV, depending on what part of the country you’re in. Science had one, but nobody I knew bothered to go. It cost too much and besides, we were all grunge before it was cool

Now, I must say that despite the material meagerness, I received a very sound and thorough education and a great part of that was the unwavering support of my friends and family, and going to a school where my intellectual curiousity and geekiness fit right in. I never got mugged, never got robbed, never fell through a rotting floor or anything, and I took two rattletrap city buses every day in total safety. Nor do I mean to suggest that no city school is into sports–some in Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island have fine teams, and the Catholic system’s another story–but given the perennial budget problems NYC just can’t field the money that some suburban and rural schools can spend on sports. Also, my info is now 20 years out of date. But it’s such a freakin’ huge country, and the main perspective shown abroad (and here too) seems to be that of the manicured suburban sprawling football-crazy HS. When my type of urban school is shown, there’s always gunfire in the background and Michelle Pfieffer is trying to save our souls from the deadening aspects of city life

And also, it’s a matter of priorities. Some of these rituals are given great prominence in poor school districts around the country, as there’s fewer schools, fewer things to do on weekends and all, and people who don’t move around as much and have generations who have participated in the same rituals. If we get an alumnus of a “historically Black” college in this thread, you’ll probably hear a lot about bands; some of the best American bands and drum squads come from these schools, see the new movie ‘Drumline’.

I don’t think it would be my bag–gimme hanging out in the West Village rather than a football stadium–but sometimes I’m jealous of how much fun it looks!

Finally, thanks for answering questions about the British school system. Speaking of stereotypes: I always thought y’all had to take a test at 14 that determined the rest of your lives! The rich and brilliant would go on to languish with teddy bears in beautiful, homoerotic-pervaded ivy-covered universities, while 90% would be marched right to the coal mines or the sculleries!

[rackensack]

*Originally posted by Bean Counter *
**The reason they started offering a Masters in Accounting is that they recently changed the requirements to sit for the CPA exam. One of the requirements is now 150 hours of college credits, effectively a Master’s Degree. If you school had not started this, an accounting student would had graduated from your college and still go somewhere else to get the required credits necessary in order to sit for the exam. Not too much of an incentive to go to Hendrix for an accounting degree in this one-stop-shopping world of ours if they did not offer it. **

I understand that. I’ve always felt that the sort of professional certification training provided in an accounting degree program is somewhat at odds with the traditional mission of a liberal arts college, which is to provide a well-rounded general education, not professional training and credentialization. I questioned the existence of Hendrix’s undergraduate accounting and business degree programs twenty years ago when I was there. I understand why economics is taught at liberal arts institutions, but business or accounting courses seem (IMO) out of place. Peter Drucker has since almost convinced me that business, or at least management, can be considered a liberal art, though I still hold my position on accounting. However, with a fairly well-established business and accounting faculty, it was inevitable that they’d offer the M.A. in accounting once the CPA requirements changed.

I have nothing against accounting; I was the star pupil in my high school accounting courses, and some of my best friends and relatives are accountants ;). Understand, too, that I’m not denigrating professional training and certifications, or even suggesting that they have no place in higher education institutions; I am maintaining, however, that an institution like Hendrix that has a clear focus on providing a quality traditional liberal arts undergraduate education muddies the waters when it begins instituting “me-too” programs like this. Competition for students and their dollars is fierce in this post-baby-boom world, however.

[susan]

However, I have never heard of a stand-alone college with no university association that granted an advanced degree.

Oops, I forgot about professional schools. These are either associated with a underversity or are free-standing. For example, California School of Professional Psychology was a freestanding, doctorate-granting entity (it has now been absorbed into Alliant University).

[Wendell_Wagner]

Nearly everything is variable in American education. Although nearly all American high schools have sports teams, yearbooks, and senior proms, the social significance of these things varies quite widely. Furthermore, there is a lot of variation about what sport is the most popular. You know, these sorts of questions come up a lot. I think we should write an FAQ on American education for non-Americans so we can just refer to it rather than having a long new thread every time it comes up.