I used to know someone who claimed that he managed to wheedle his way into a Master’s degree program while doing his undergrad, and he ended up jumping all the way and finishing his Master’s degree and never finished his Bachelor’s, but I never actually went back and verified it, because it didn’t really matter to me.
The evidence is abundantly clear that it is possible to “skip” educational qualifications along the general hierarchy used in English speaking countries (i.e. High School, Bachelor’s, Master’s, Doctorate). I know that is is fairly common to jump straight from awarded BS or BA right into a doctoral program, and it is possible to get into college (BS or BA program) without a high school diploma or GED if you try hard enough (e.g. My local community college will let you in with no high school diploma or GED. You could get an Associate’s degree from them and then transfer to a 4 year school and get a BS or BA, having never finished high school or gotten a GED).
My question is WHY would a person go back and fill in the gaps?
I can think of two possible primary reasons:
Personal pride, a desire to experience the lower level in full, or a desire to learn basics that weren’t covered in the higher levels and that you ended up not needing to finish the higher levels. E.g. perhaps you never finished your Laboratory Science undergrad requirement (e.g. Chem, Physics, Bio) because you got a special admission straight to Law School because you blew the LSAT away and your uncle is the State Attorney General, and law school didn’t require that you do any laboratory science.
You need the qualification for some practical purpose. E.g. you have a Master’s Degree, but you want to do a PhD program and they require an undergrad degree as a qualification, and they won’t let you substitute your Master’s, or you want a job but the company has a hard and absolute requirement that you have a high school qualification (or GED), and higher qualifications won’t substitute per policy.
My interest in mathematics is purely for personal fulfillment, and I have considered the possibility of, given time and finances, getting a BS in math purely for the challenge. Having no higher math in my background beyond high school trigonometry, it would be ludicrous for me to attempt to seek a master’s degree.
Sure, I have a BA with high honors and departmental honors, plus five years of doctoral studies, and two years as a teaching fellow abroad.
I’m going to get an Associates now – I never learned formally science (except for deductive sciences in grad school). Strictly trade, initially, but now I enjoy the material and will likely go for a second Bachelors, in Science, as a dual EE and CS major. Also, the women are amazing, and while I haven’t really had the time to get “into” “it,” they seem to not be grossed out that I’m old (35) and we have fun chatting.
Actually, it’s the women. They’re fucking fantastic, and I’m no perv – just friendly and talkative, and also damned good looking, apparently, and non-douchey. Apparently that means a lot at a community college.
As I hear it, this does happen in government jobs. If they require a high school diploma, they won’t hire anyone who doesn’t have one regardless of their degrees.
I ran into this problem. Back in the day, I left high school after my junior year to enroll in the nearby state university. I finished two years there, but left without a degree. Years pass, and I enroll and complete nursing school. Next step is being authorized to take the licensing exam. It was during this scrutiny that I was informed I would have to obtain a high school diploma or GED. Period. End of sentence. No diploma= no test=no RN. The upshot is I now have a high diploma dated two months after my nursing school diploma.
Also, there’s the fact that literature (comparative) Ph.D.s don’t generally know or care about deductive science – enemy territory (the Anglo-Austro-American faction, don’t you know). Their courses, at the “best” places, are jokes about jokes, and there is no effort to comprehend anything beyond self-serving twaddle served up by “The French.” Yes, everyone in those departments knows German, French, an antique language, and probably some more modern languages, but they have no interest in rigor, as a group. Therefore, their discipline is without merit, taken generally. Not as soft as single-language disciplines (English, French, whatever – most Ph.D.s in those areas are dumbasses), but pretty damned soft and vain and without the tools (basic tools – formalization) to discover correct answers to their little problems.
What’s that old joke? Even the French have discovered a definition of truth. “There isn’t one.” Tarski it ain’t, semantics it ain’t, and even writing in formalized languages is likely beyond the interest, ken, or capacity of your average bohunk slinging words.
I wanted to retrain as an actuary. To do that I needed to demonstrate that my maths skills were sufficient. To do that I would need to re-take my A level maths, despite having a degree (and I got an A grade at A level maths over 25 years ago).
When I spent a month visiting U. Aarhus in Denmark, I got a month’s pay that was based on the length of time since master’s. Ah, I don’t actually have a master’s; I went directly to PhD. Oh, well what year would you have gotten a master’s if you had? That was easy. AB 1959, PhD 1962 so I put down 1960 and they accepted it. So I was never tempted.
But I could picture myself going back and getting a bachelor’s in another subject, if it didn’t cost me anything.
If you want a teaching credential in Colorado, you have to have a bachelor’s degree - a master’s or doctorate doesn’t count so if you had a post-grad only and want to teach in this state you would have to go bach and get the lower degree.
It happens with lawyers fairly frequently. Say you have a BA in history and a JD, but you decide the cool new field is patent work in biotechnology. It is quite common for this person to go back and get a BS in biology.
I cannot figure out what the above has to do with anything.
(Also, plenty of Comp Lit people are plenty smart. They’re not after scientific or philosophical truths, for the most part, and it’s wrong to hold them to standards associated with that pursuit.)
In New York State if you have successfully completed 24 college credits that and a 10 dollar bill will get you a GED. Get a GED for a sawbuck? Who wouldn’t? They’re lots of jobs that insist on a high school graduation or equivalent.
The UK doesn’t have a ‘high school diploma’ but discreet exams in specific subjects. A lot of jobs and courses specify GCSEs (the exams you usually take at the age of 16) in English, maths and science (science only applies for people born after 1980 - it wasn’t a compulsory GCSE subject for people who went to school before then) at grade C or above. Older people in particular might never have taken those exams at all. So you get an awful lot of well-qualified, well-educated people taking evening classes in these subjects.
Teaching courses are sticklers for this. You can actually get around it by taking a test at the college, but unless you’re a shoo-in for the course, you probably won’t get past the application stage without a GCSE. The college tests are for people from other countries or people, like me, whose GCSE maths cert has disappeared from even the exam boards’ databases.
Without going into a long explanation of how medical degrees and the medical system work in Spain, a friend who was already a doctor (but not having done required post-university work, she could work temp positions but not apply for permanent ones) got a degree in nursing so she’d be able to temp both as a nurse and as a doctor: more work, but with the flexibility and lower pressure of temp vs perma. I don’t know if there ever was a time when she got assigned to the same office at different times as both the nurse and the doctor, but it could have been possible.
She got the postgrad work done and applied for a permanent position when her kids were in high school; that is, when the flexibility she got from temping wasn’t attractive any more. Since she had a ton of points from having worked in the system for so long, she got the permanent position on the first try.
Comp lit people are idiots. If you aren’t after some kind of truth, what is even the point in all that work? You read, and you do “original research” which, in comp lit, is an oxymoron, it means you steal from a lot of people, because what kind of original research can you do other than digest what everybody else has already written? And it’s a degree that, as an MA, is useless unless you’re going on for a PhD, which is also useless unless you’re going to teach, and if you’re not, you damn well should have had the gumption and the smarts to figure it out before you got the MA.