I can sort of understand it with engineering (my major). The time formerly spent studying vacuum tubes is now spent covering transistors. A lot of electromagnetics has been phased out to make room for digital electronics. But still, engineering majors have much heavier course loads than their liberal arts peers and it takes many students closer to 5 years to get a bachelors.
But physics (and biology, and lots of other sciences) have made huge strides in the last century, and the number of papers published has increased exponentially since then. Don’t we know a lot more about physics since Einstein was a student? Doesn’t that mean we have to teach more? I understand that most cutting edge science is learned in graduate school, but that just pushes the question back further. It still only takes 8 years (roughly) to get a Ph.D., same as in 1909. Why?
I don’t intend to make this question specifically about physics, or 1909 either. Do we really have the same amount of “stuff” to teach Dance majors as Biology majors? Why does every degree take the same amount of time? What about a long ass time ago? Even in Newton’s day, undergrads went to school for 4 years, although grad school didn’t really exist then, I don’t think. Surely Newton didn’t have the same amount of knowledge taught to him as present day undergrads?
Well a four year undergraduate physics degree does not make you a physicist. Most people who do physics have Phds. And then those people have a somewhat narrow specialty within physics.
With physics, math and other technical degrees, four years is still sufficient time to teach students the basic knowledge they need to go further and give them at least some experience thinking and writing like a physicist/mathematician/etc., but no one expects mastery at that level.
Even in engineering, the situation isn’t all that different. Four years is sufficient time to expose someone to the basic curriculum of the field, but there’s really no room for specialization until after the bachelor’s level.
Arts and humanities degrees are similar, although there tends to be a little bit more room for concentrating on a specific subject as an undergrad. There’s still more than enough information to spend four years on the bachelor’s degree.
I would think that some of the material taught even 10 years ago is no longer relevant. While its true that great strides have been made in various fields recently, it seems to me that many times these great strides end up inherently obsoleting some material that may have been previously taught.
On second thought, though - if something can be so easily dismissed, then it probably isn’t in a 4 year physics course. Some things are just not going to change - 9.8 meters per second squared with no drag, F=ma, K=1/2mv^2 - that kind of stuff.
So I’d think that most of the great strides stuff you are talking about are at the higher end - well beyond the normal course material taught in a 4 yr degree.
In other words - what gazpacho said - 4 yr undergraduate physics degree does not make you a physicist on par with those who work at LLNL or some other cutting edge facility.
Why 4 years then, and not 3 or 5? And why is it the same for everybody, regardless of major? And Ph.D.s have always taken about the same amount of time; were the physicists of yesteryear less specialized than their present day counterparts?
How does this parallel the medical profession? As I understand it, a physician or surgeon has to learn for 12 or more years before being allowed to practice independently. Was this the case a hundred years ago, or has more information been packed into a medical degree?
There are some subjects in physics that are not taught as much as they once were. Optics, acoustics, and (more generally) wave mechanics are not covered as subjects per se as they once might have been; wave phenomena are usually treated as part of electrodynamics and/or quantum mechanics. Fluid dynamics and continuum dynamics have for the most part been ceded to you folks in the engineering department. More recently, I believe that nuclear physics was more commonly taken in the '50s and '60s than it was today, though unlike the above mentioned subjects its decline isn’t so much due to a need to “make room for new knowledge” in the curriculum.
Well 4 years is the traditional undergraduate length. So that is really the main reason for not 3 or 5 years. Although I would say that in some hard science fields it is not uncommon for the length of time it takes a large number of people to finish the undergraduate degree is moving to 5 years for the degree rather than 4.
So why did we settle on 4 years? Why settle on any number at all? Wouldn’t it make more sense to base the length of time in school on what must be learned rather than shaping the curriculum based on an arbitrary length of time? Can anyone point me to a decent history of higher learning where I might get further answers to these kinds of questions?
That’s true, and it’s also true that the undergraduate curriculum can in some cases be viewed as cutting off shortly after Einstein. You’ll certainly need to figure out the basics of quantum physics and relativity. I’m pretty sure though that you could get an undergraduate degree without learning very much at all about quarks or string theory or a lot of the stuff that has dominated the headlines for the past 40-50 years. Some of that may make sense, and not only because that’s really advanced, theoretical subject matter, but some of it’s still viewed as unsettled or conjectural (cf. how they give Nobel prizes ca. 30 years after a theory’s been out in the marketplace and subject to attack/validation).
I can’t speak for physics since I wasn’t in the physics program for very long, but in chemistry at least, they just teach enough basics to get your feet wet. Chemistry is one of the fastest changing feilds there is, but what is taught to undergrads has barely changed in fifty years. It isn’t important that the reactions we teach to undergrads aren’t used anymore, it is more important that they learn to create strategies to make molecules with any available reaction set.
The one thing that has changed in chemistry is the introduction of materials chemistry. I think mostly this has supplanted inorganic chemistry. I haven’t seen an inorganic chemistry course since I was an undergrad.
And sully your beautiful mind with the liberal arts you hold in such contempt?!?! After all, what could those people possibly need four or more years for?
So, good luck signing up students for a 6, or 8, or 10, or 20 year degree course (or much longer if you really want them to learn everything we know about physics) when they can get a degree in another subject in just 4.
If you want to sell a course to students it has got to be of a reasonable length, and competitive with what is being offered in other subject areas. As the amount of stuff available to be taught grows, the solution is not to lengthen the course, but to specialize, and if necessary to split one degree subject into two (or more). Back in the middle ages, everyone took essentially the same set of courses in university. Now we have a lot more stuff we can teach, and there are lots of choices of subject matter. I do not really know if physics is yet ripe for splitting into two or more different, more specialized, undergraduate majors, but it may happen one day.
I don’t know what it’s like today, but at my undergrad, an engineering major (particularly EE) mean you had to take mostly a full load every semester, while liberal arts majors (excluding hard sciences) didn’t have to. Most people I knew who were liberal arts could have gotten their majors in 3 years if they wanted to. I myself did a dual major in four years, but I could have finished with a EE in 3 years if I had wanted to (but that’s only because I had taken enough AP classes in high school to come in as a sophomore).
I guess it comes down to what the goal of higher education is supposed to be, which is not really a GQ answer. I can see the more general majors selling their degree as “four years worth of learning”, and just fitting as much into that timeframe as they can. But some degrees are sold as preparing you for a particular job (accounting, engineering), and some are sold as making you an “expert” in your field (graduate and doctorate programs); these would seem to entail specific content and not just “learning for X amount of time”.
Kimmy, I have no issue with liberal arts. I don’t know where you got that. Maybe I am mistaken in my perception, though. Most liberal arts to me seems much more about personal development than information cramming, which makes it more conducive to time limits. You need to develop your writing skills, your researching skills, your debating and criticizing skills, you need to develop your musical, artistic, acting, etc, skills. So it doesn’t seem as counter intuitive that it takes the same amount of time to get a degree in Theater or Literature as it did a hundred years ago.
Although, looking at it from that perspective, I guess it could apply to the technical realm as well. They’re teaching you how to be a physicist or how to be an engineer, not a certain set of facts. It’s the skills you learn that are more important.
Happens all the time. Some universities offer undergraduate degrees in Astronomy, Applied Physics, Engineering Physics, and many others. The base B.S. in Physics is generally a preparation for further specialization in graduate school, a process which usually starts in the Junior year.
Most degrees last 4 years through a combination of financial aid, social pressures, and accreditation.
Right. A degree majoring in a particular subject doesn’t exactly correspond with a specific body of knowledge to be learned; it’s at least as much a way of thinking and working that one becomes familiar with. At most schools, the requirements for a major (at least in math, the subject I’m familiar with; I’m guessing it’s the same with other subjects) involve some options or electives, some things they’ll choose to study and some they won’t get around to.
And most “liberal arts colleges” offer majors in things like physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics (but not things like engineering or accounting or medicine or law, though a liberal arts graduate could certainly go on to study these things in graduate school).
I think the difference is that most of your BS in engineering degrees are your end-state degrees in those fields, at least in the professional world. Sure, there are plenty of Masters and PhDs of Civil Engineering (for example), but the vast majority of working civil engineers have BS degrees.
Physicists, on the other hand, are pretty much exclusively PhD holders, as are most of your working anthropologists, psychologists, etc… primarily because to be a “working” physicist, it means you’re an academic of some sort, whether or not you work at a University or not.
And, in my experience, the degree structure is set up to reflect that- most of the BA or BS degrees in the disciplines that required a PhD to work in the field seemed relatively easy to those of us in the engineering fields. Thing was, only a small percentage of the people who get the bachelors in the PhD type fields actually end up working in that field.
In essence, the bachelors degree in those fields is just a preparation for a PhD program down the road, while for engineers and other similar technical fields (computer science, architecture, many Ag fields, some business ones) require 5 years, whether it’s official or not (some have 5 year BS/MS programs, others just require so many hours that you can’t do it in 4).
Exactly. The undergraduate education process is pretty much standardized for each institution: so many years to degree, so many required courses to graduate, so many AP credits accepted in lieu of college courses, etc.
If colleges started customizing these requirements for different majors, it would become a logistical nightmare. For one thing, you would have no idea how big each year’s freshman class would be upon graduation, because you wouldn’t know how long a particular student would remain on campus until they picked a major. The large fluctuations in class size would play hell with your arrangements for campus housing, among many other things.
Educational institutions, especially residential ones, just don’t have the luxury of individual autonomy on a lot of these issues, as nice as that might be from a pure academic-freedom standpoint.
Well, doctoral programs generally do have varying time-to-degree expectations depending on what field you’re in. (Although there is a strong push nowadays among graduate school administrations to make the time-to-degree more uniform across different fields, and many professors are unhappy about it.)
Interestingly, fields like physics and engineering tend to have significantly shorter time-to-degree on average at the doctoral level than fields in humanities and arts do. This is because humanities subjects often require deeper and broader background knowledge at that level: for instance, Comparative Literature doctorates are notoriously prolonged because the student has to become intimately familiar with at least two different foreign languages and literary traditions.
Moreover, humanities dissertations are generally expected to be comparable to a scholarly monograph in terms of size and complexity. They’re supposed to be, in essence, a draft of your first published book, so they’re a fairly major project. Dissertations in math and the sciences, on the other hand, are usually closer to the size of a research article, and often have more direct guidance from the thesis advisor. That’s not to say that science dissertations don’t represent a lot of grueling hard work and long labor, of course (especially in the lab sciences, where experimental setup and maintenance can be a major project in itself, and with no guarantees that you might not have to do it all over again from scratch). But they usually end up being significantly shorter and taking less time than humanities dissertations.
