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! 🫶
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This is known as “General Education”, or GE, and is very much a thing for almost all Bachelors’ degrees in the US. The belief is that all students should be somewhat well-rounded if they’ve achieved a liberal arts education.
Typically full universities are broken into large areas of focus or “colleges” based on your major department, and one of the few differences that are important between them is that they will often have their own GE requirements on top of university-wide ones.
Simple example: my university requires that *all* students take a Communications 103 class and fulfill a baseline math requirement. The “College of Arts and Letters” within my university further required that *all* of its students take a Rhetoric and Writing course and at least two semesters of a foreign language. Individual majors then may also have additional non-departmental graduation requirements, such as a statistics class from the Math department as a requirement for a Political Science degree.
This is one of the reasons that Advanced Placement, IB, or honors classes are highly recommended in high school for those students that can succeed in them and are expecting to apply to college. Most schools will treat passing grades in those classes (or passing the relevant tests) as college credit. With careful planning, a bright high school student can get much of their GE requirement out of the way without having to take those courses again in college.
Although it’s less common in some areas now than it was, it was formerly *very* common for prospective students to attend two years at a “junior college” (or community college) expressly for the purpose of getting their GE requirements out of the way at a **much** cheaper cost. After two years, you’d then transfer in to a four-year university and declare a major.
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