My entire personal experience with higher education is at the community college level. I’m a fairly smart person, and while I didn’t do very well in formal schooling, I think I have self-educated myself to a decent level of knowledge, and I have a good chunk of common sense. I have been active in the local public school district for years, and I have actually TAUGHT classes (not academics, but still.) That said, I feel like an utter moron when I’m around those who speak academia.
I understand the progression of degrees to a point - one gets an associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s, then a master’s, then a doctorate, right? I’m not clear on what a “baccalaureate” is, and I’m completely in the dark about what graduate school and/or post-graduate degree are.
I’m not familiar with an associate’s degree - it may be something special to the U.S.?
In Canada, you start with a bachelor’s degree - you need to have a high school diploma to enter the bachelor’s program. A “baccalaureate” is a Latin term for a bachelor’s degree.
Masters and doctorates are graduate degrees. The term means that you have to have graduated with a bachelor’s degree to enter the masters or doctorate program.
Basically, you get a graduate degree to learn more about a subject, usually, though not always, the same or a similar subject to your undergraduate studies.
It should also be noted that you don’t need a Master’s degree to get a doctorate (PhD.) Plus, there are professional doctorates, such as MD and JD (is that what it’s called? Whatever law school graduates get.)
An associates degree is usually a 2 year degree and typically technical in nature. A Bachelors degree is like he said a 4 year degree. However an Associate to Bachelor degree is not usually a straight progression. For example having an associate degree will not usually put you 2 years into a 4 year bachelors degree.
Associate of Arts = a degree offered by some community (2-year) colleges.
Graduate school = a place you go for advanced work beyond a Bachelor’s degree. While such schools as medical schools, law schools and Bus Ad schools are post-graduate schools, usually a “grad school” in the more classic sense is a place you go to get your Masters of Arts/Science/Education/Fine Arts, etc., and/or your PhD, Ed.D., or other doctorate.
Note that this is not a precise definition, nor is it intended to be an all encompassing one. No nitpicking allowed.
A baccalaureate is a bachelor’s. Once you have that, you’re considered a Graduate, so going back for more schooling after that makes you a Graduate Student.
Fields vary, but the basic progression is 4 year Bachelor’s, 2 year Master’s with a substantial thesis (written paper) due before you earn the degree and then 4 more years of classroom work towards your Ph.D. before you start researching your dissertation - a very lengthy paper that demonstrates original theory or research on a topic in your field. Some people jokingly refer to themselves as “ABD”, meaning “All But Dissertation” if they’ve completed their classroom work but haven’t finished their dis yet, but it’s not an official designation.
Law school is three years of schooling after your Bachelor’s.
Medical school is more complex, with usually two years of school only and then another two years of being a student doctor under very close supervision of other, more experienced doctors. During your forth year of med school, you apply for a Residency, which is still learning and working under the supervision of an Attending, with gradually increasing autonomy. After completing one year of Residency, you’re considered A Doctor and may get your license (after meeting whatever other requirements the state has.) Most people work for three years (internal medicine), five years (surgery) or seven years (neurosurgery) years as Residents before making the leap to Attending or to a Fellowship. A Fellowship is further training in a specialized field of medicine, like cardiology or oncology. After a Fellowship, the doctor may choose to become “board-certified” in her field of study. An Attending is a fully qualified doctor in a nonspecialty, and is often The Boss, or at least the guy in charge of the shift.
I can tell you a bit about how a graduate (doctoral) program in the hard sciences works. First of all, the “graduate” in graduate school is short for “post-graduate”. Any program that requires you to have a bachelor’s (baccalaureate) degree before you can apply is a post-graduate program. As a university student studying for a bachelor’s degree, you’re called an undergraduate; once you’ve completed that, you’ve graduated, and can enroll in a post-graduate program.
In the US, when someone says “graduate school”, they usually mean a post-graduate program that awards degrees other than Law or Medicine. Although these degrees are technically “post-graduate”, they have separate degree-granting bodies (Colleges of Law and Medicine, respectively - other graduate students are under the aegis of the Graduate College), and are not considered “graduate school” in the common sense of the word. Medical school, in fact, is considered to be “undergraduate medical education” - residency is the real “post-graduate medical education”.
When you are accepted into graduate school, you become a graduate student. Although you’re under the Graduate College for the purposes of certain accounting, you are in fact directly under some department or school in the university. Unlike an undergrad, who’s in the College of Arts and Sciences, or the College of Engineering, you are in the Department of Chemistry, or the Department of Electrical Engineering. Your department sets specific milestones for you, above and beyond what the graduate college does. (The graduate college enforces very, very, very minor sorts of milestones - it’s impossible to box any number of graduate students together under some sort of coherent framework, so generally they don’t bother.) The department determined the criteria under which to admit you to the university: you applied directly to the Department, rather than the College.
As a first-year graduate student in the hard sciences, you would be taking general classes expected for a graduate student in your particular discipline, and looking for a lab to join. Grad students in the hard sciences and engineering typically have a full tuition waiver, plus a salary - not much, but enough to live on. The details differ depending on the program (masters vs doctoral), the school, and the phase of the moon. Classes, really, are a secondary matter - for instance, I only needed to complete 32 credits of them (compared to at least 130 for my bachelor’s degree). Your main task is research. If you’re a master’s student, you stay in the lab for a little while, and write a master’s thesis. If you’re a doctoral student, you stay in the lab for a long time, and write a doctoral dissertation. This dissertation is supposed to be a new and original contribution to the state of the art in your chosen field. Once you’ve jumped through the appropriate hoops (passed your qualification, preliminary, and final exams) and had the appropriate people in your department sign off on this (your dissertation committee - a group of (theoretically) learned individuals who assess your contribution to the field), you are a newly-minted PhD.
Associate’s degree is from a 2-year college… can you get an associate’s in a four-year college? Or would you skip that and just be working toward your bachelor’s at a four-year school? I seem to remember some classes at the community college being transferrable, and I believe it meant those classes you took at the community college level DID count toward your bachelor’s should you transfer to a four-year school. Am I correct there?
You’d then get your bachelor’s degree from completeing a four-year plan at a university, right? Am I also correct in assuming that you’d have to be completing a specific four-year plan to get that degree - in other words, you couldn’t just take random classes, the degree program would specify a curriculum for a degree in arts, science or…are there others?
What if you just go to college for four years (and of course, pass the classes you take)? Is there a “general education” degree equivalent to a bachelor’s?
And finally - graduate school, where you’d pursue your master’s and/or doctorate: I understand med school or law school, but can you also pursue those degrees at, say, a state university?
(On edit - I see that some of my questions here have been answered in the posts that went up while I was composing this one. Please carry on with the remainder of my questions )
Typically you’d work toward a bachelor’s degree at a 4-year school.
Yes. It depends on the contents of the classes and the schools. The 4-year school would review the content that the 2-year classes provided to determine whether to accept the credits.
Typically you’d have a specific plan that would call for core classes but would allow for “elective” classes of your choice, though it might state how electives would need to be in, say engineering vs. social sciences. The plan might also require you to take electives of a specific difficulty, e.g. to prevent a senior student from loading up on electives that were aimed at freshmen.
Typically, you would approach this as another plan of study–it would be called something like “General Studies” or “General Arts and Sciences” or something like that. It would also have a program of required and elective classes; it would just be less specialized. Rather than simply taking classes willy-nilly, you would need to make sure to at least meet the requirements of the plan.
Well, the med school or law school could well be part of the state university. Just like State U. would have a School of Engineering, it would also have a School of Medicine or a School of Law.
Of course. Most, if not all state universities have a school of law, and medical schools are required to be affiliated with a university (most are simply part of the university). The latter requirement is due to the Flexner Report, a document published in 1910, which set the blueprint for modern medical education in the US.
For the record, the organization of a typical university is:
A university contains colleges.
A college contains schools.
A school contains departments.
A department contains faculty and students.
So, for example: I’m a student at Big State University. I’m in the Multidimensional Widget Engineering department. That department, in turn, is part of the School of Unfeasible Engineering. The school is part of the College of Engineering.
There are overlapping affiliations (I’m a graduate student, so I’m part of the Graduate College. But my department is part of the College of Engineering.), but usually, these are not very important to anyone but the university accountants.
Let’s say that, in my spare time, I’m also a medical student. That means that I’m a student in the College of Medicine of Big State University. (Med students typically have no further affiliation.) The College of Medicine contains the School of Medicine, and usually that’s it. The School of Medicine contains the Departments of Neurology, Pathology, etc. Some of these layers may be removed - i.e., the College may contain the Departments directly.
Sometimes there are weird intermediate layers: I’m a student in Multidimensional Widget Engineering, but technically, I’m a student in the Interdisciplinary Center for Spending Other People’s Money. My advisor (and lab head, the guy in whose lab I work) is a professor of Multidimensional Widget Engineering. So you can say that I’m either a student of Spending Other People’s Money, or a student of Multidimensional Widget Engineering. Either’d be right.
My goodness! I really hope that 4 years of classwork for a PhD is not typical in most places. It certainly isn’t in history - usually the MA/PhD (or PhD only straight from a bachelors) takes 4 years of coursework total, and a PhD with an MA from a different school is 3 years of coursework. As well, in at least some places (like mine) ABD is, actually, an official designation.
When you get a bachelor’s degree, you typically major in something. The requirements for that major vary. It is often possible to get two in four years - my daughter has degrees in economics and psychology - since the common requirements are the same. I’ve never heard of a general education degree here. You get a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science typically, depending on the school. You can major in science ans still get a BA.
Yes. A university, by definition, offers graduate degrees.
Not all those who go to graduate school go for PhDs. Many people, especially in engineering, teaching, library science, etc., end with Masters degrees. This gives you a bit more depth than an undergraduate degree. Yes, state universities often have very good graduate programs - sometimes the best. You tend to apply depending on the specialties of the department, and often for a professor you want to work with. As an undergraduate, you take classes from many different departments, as a grad student you take from one or very few departments.
Typically, when you get into grad school you have to take a series of exams in various aspects of your subject to show that you are well rounded in it. These were called quals where I went. (I moved, and have the dubious distinction of having passed quals and orals twice.) Orals are a more detailed, oral examination, usually just a few questions you need to answer in depth. After you do those, you find yourself an advisor, and a committee, and start researching your dissertation. After that is done, you get grilled on it by your committee, but since you know more about this minute subject than anyone in the world at this point, it is easy.
Some places make you write a Masters thesis, and some don’t. Even in a single university it is different. The first place I went, the University of Illinois, you needed to pass most of your quals for a masters, and had to write a thesis in Computer Science. Those who failed went to EE which didn’t require quals or a thesis, just classwork.
Masters students typically don’t get support or assistantships. Some universities use them to help the budget. And the Masters Thesis is typically not as long or detailed as a dissertation. The best I know of was that of Claude Shannon from around 1939, where he basically invented the idea of using relays and tubes to implement digital logic, and thus computers, as his Masters Thesis. He invented a few other fields later.
It isn’t. I had to take 32 credits for my PhD in Biophysics and Computational Biology, and I covered that in a year and a half, with other commitments. It’s readily doable in 1.
Oh, and there’s also another option: some people enter the doctoral program, and then for whatever reason decide to quit. If they meet sufficient requirements, they can leave with a master’s degree. For example, my department doesn’t even offer a master’s program, but if you meet certain conditions, you can leave the doctoral program early with a master’s degree.
Neither of those is a real doctorate, since they do not entail an original contribution to human knowledge. An exception is made for the MD degree, by long tradition, and it’s at least the terminal degree for its field. But there is no rationale whatsoever for calling a JD degree a doctorate, beyond the lawyers who named the degree deciding that they could get paid more that way.
In physics, at least, that degree is more typically referred to as “MS”. Individual universities will vary, but typically, a physics student will take all or almost all of es classroom work before earning the master’s en route, and after earning the master’s, will be spending most of es time on research (much, but not necessarily all, of which will end up as part of the thesis). Some schools, or some students, don’t do the master’s en route (so a student in such a program would go straight from Bachelor to Doctor), but even in these cases, the requirements for a master’s (if offered) are typically close to just the classwork portion of the doctorate, with the thesis chopped off. Oh, and so far as I know, the terms “thesis” and “dissertation” are completely interchangeable, but “thesis” seems to be much more commonly used among physicists.
As for subject areas, most colleges will offer an undergraduate degree in nothing in particular. The name varies from one institution to another: It might be BS or BA in Liberal Arts, or in General Studies, or University Studies (as compared to a more specialized BS in Physics, or BA in Creative Writing, or whatnot). By the time you get to grad school, though, that option disappears, so you have to have some specific major for your master’s or doctorate.
Interesting, in Europe you need a Baccalaureate to get into university, in the UK you need A levels (although the Scots have/had a slightly different system).
You then do a Bachelors degree which is 3 or sometimes 4 years, which gives you a BA or a BSc. Some places will convert that to an MA which is rather amusing.
After a Bachelors you can do a Masters which is typically about 2 years, sometimes you can convert to a Doctorate course from a Masters course.
There are variations, but that is the jist.
I’m slightly hazy about the North American system.
Or, as was the case with several folks in the English lit. Ph.D. program I was in, the department may decide this for you, e.g. if they determine that you’re unlikely to be able to complete the Ph.D. program, or even if they decide that they don’t really like you. If you fail your comprehensive exams (referred to as “quals” elsewhere in this thread) more than once, you’re likely to be instructed to write yourself a quick Master’s thesis, collect your M.A., and pursue your further education elsewhere, if at all. Ditto if you don’t pass your orals (rare, but I knew of at least one case where a complete nutjob did manage to pass his comprehensives, whereupon the faculty made sure he didn’t pass his orals). This department also generally didn’t even accept students whose goal was a master’s degree – if you weren’t Ph.D. material, they didn’t want to waste time on you. There were a few students who had unusual personal circumstances and weren’t offered fellowships (and thus were paying their own way) who were provisionally accepted as master’s candidates, with the expectation that they would either prove themselves as Ph.D. candidates within the first year or so of course work and be offered aid, or would be allowed to finish their coursework, write a thesis and be awarded a master’s degree. In some cases, ABD Ph.D. candidates could also apply for and be granted a master’s degree (with the thesis requirement waived or satisfied by the portion of the dissertation already completed) in order to help them obtain teaching jobs elsewhere while they finished their dissertations.
I think a little more discussion is in order on the difference between “graduate” and “professional” programs and degrees (both of which are considered “graduate” in the sense of post-bachelors).
Several posters have pointed out that the Ph.D. is considered a graduate degree and the M.D. and J. D. are considered professional. However, there are a lot more advanced degrees out there, most of which are considered “professional.”
Most universities have a “College of Arts and Sciences,” “School of Arts and Sciences” or “Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” which includes the hard sciences, social sciences and humanities. There will also be other colleges/schools/faculties usually of a more applied or specialized nature such as business, law, engineering, medicine, nursing, education, etc., generally classed as “professional schools.”
The arts and sciences school will generally grant Masters of Arts (M.A.) and Masters of Science (M.S.) degrees, which are considered to be “graduate” degrees and more purely academic in nature. The professional schools will usually have specialized programs of study leading to a specific “professional” degree (M.B.A., J.D., M.S.Chem.Eng., M.D., M.S.N., M.Ed., etc.). The Ph.D. program, often awarded by many different schools within a university, pretty much always follows the traditionaly coursework/dissertation/oral argument pattern and is considered the top academic degree and a “graduate” degree whether it is taken in nanoengineering or English literature.
Grossly overstereotyping, graduate students are seen to be more interested and involved in the university and academic life as a whole, and professional students are seen to be more focused on their particular program and obtaining their specific training and qualification.
Which is why in Canada, only the wankers at U. of T. get the JD - as far as I know, all the other law schools give the LL.B. - because it is the introductory level degree in the field of law. You want to go further, you get a Masters of Law (LL.M.) and then an S.J.D.
I’m quite content with having a couple of LL.B. degrees, instead of a J.D., which is just academic penis envy, as far as I’m concerned.
A point which has been mentioned but bears repeating is that graduate students (working towards Ph.D.s), at least in the sciences, often have all tuition covered and are paid by the university. They are expected to work as either teaching assistants (teaching low-level courses, grading papers, holding office hours) or research assistants (implementing their advisor’s research program). Being a Ph.D. student is not like being an undergrad, where you take classes all day. Doing well in graduate classes is the minimum requirement for staying in the program. Learning how to do original research that a community of experts will be interested in is the primary point of it. If don’t come up with any original ideas, you won’t get the Ph.D.
Graduate students can also do things like go to conferences (I’ve been lucky enough to go to conferences in Brazil, Australia, and Germany), meet other people working in their fields at other universities, and go to internships where they do research outside of a university setting. All in all, not a bad life, though it’s lots of work for little pay.
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