I live in Australia where if you study a particular degree, all (or the vast majority) of your subjects are directly related to that field.
I may be wrong but movies tend to give me the impression that at American universities/colleges, all students study a wide array of subjects, attend random lectures, and students room with people studying different things.
It also appears to be a lot about the lifestyle and not just get in, do your study, get your degree.
Are American studies specialised or more general?
Thank you! 🫶
In: 84
I think that most colleges and universities do have a “general education” requirement. However, there is a specific spectrum; the greater its general education requirements, the more likely the school is to market itself as providing a “liberal arts” education. This is a matter of degree, and not kind; I went to a “liberal arts” school, but the actual “liberal arts” component was equivalent to maybe 20% of the classes I took. The bulk of my courses were directly relevant to my particular subject area, my “major”.
Also, the general education requirements were structured such that courses in your major itself would account for many of them. For example, the “quantitative reasoning” and “hard sciences” requirements were satisfied by normal courses I already needed; I also could’ve taken courses in my major that satisfied the social science requirements.
Whereas, one of the requirements was that you had to take a certain number of years of a foreign-language class. Your requirements were determined by the skill level you came with; if you already arrived bilingual (or more), that would be just one course one of your semesters (out of a typical four-or-five course classload per semester for four years), whereas if you arrived with no background, you had to take three. I arrived with some background, so I needed two.
Hollywood depictions are generally somewhat of an “agreed-upon fantasy,” often rooted in particular regions. Depictions of an “American high school” are often based on California, for example. For universities, there’s a certain amount of “just ignore the details, play up anything that people remember liking about college.”
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