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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Classes are specialized towards your degree, however, many colleges make you take basic classes your freshman semester. Additionally, the degree may have a few electives you can pick not related to your degree. I majored in a science degree, but I took a few classes not related that I was interested in, and it counted for credits towards my degree.
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.
I’ll chime in here and add that some non-American universities allow for mixing your curriculum. Glasgow University science students will have a set number of credits to achieve to graduate the year, but they can be achieved across courses, typically in the form of taking three sciences in your first year then two in your second, and you specialise after that.
There are requirements for progression- you can’t enter 2nd year Computing Science without having a passed all the modules in 1st year Compsci and also all of them in 1st year Mathematics, for instance. However you can make up the additional credits doing another science like chemistry or biology, or a business studies course. Provided none of it conflicts with anything else of course.
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.
The vast majority of jobs/careers in America don’t require a degree in any particular field. In fact, most employers that do require a degree have workers doing tasks that don’t need a degree at all – just the ability to read, learn, follow instructions, and research. And since most young people are clueless about their career choices, they can get the basic generic college education out of the way in the first year or so and then decide what interests them. History and chemistry are kind of pointless if you go into healthcare, but they did allow me to make good grades and get grants and scholarships. So my general classes basically funded my specific classes.
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The vast majority of jobs/careers in America don’t require a degree in any particular field. In fact, most employers that do require a degree have workers doing tasks that don’t need a degree at all – just the ability to read, learn, follow instructions, and research. And since most young people are clueless about their career choices, they can get the basic generic college education out of the way in the first year or so and then decide what interests them. History and chemistry are kind of pointless if you go into healthcare, but they did allow me to make good grades and get grants and scholarships. So my general classes basically funded my specific classes.
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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.”
>Are American studies specialised or more general?
Depends on the college, the field of study, and to some extent, the person.
A typical university, for most degrees, will have significant General Education requirements. In your first year, you do some introductory field-specific classes, field-specific prerequisites (e.g., math classes if you’re a chemist), and a number of GenEd classes. Often GenEd and prereqs bleed into year two, but get less common. In years 3 and 4 it’s typically only field-specific classes and advanced related courses (e.g., more advanced math for a physicist).
Depending on the degree program, though, you often have a fair amount of “free space” to work with in the later years. You could do more classes within your field of study, but you could also branch out and do related things that are interesting to you. They could be just interesting or they could be both interesting and relevant. For example, maybe you’re a CS major, but you dedicate all your free time to art and sociology so that you have a particular perspective on UX.
At the far end of this spectrum, there is a liberal arts degree. That is really about studying a broad array of things and just being an educated person in general. There are also schools where you more or less invent your own degree program. You may think it’s weird, but historically, higher education is more aligned with liberal arts (general education) than with field-specific training. (By “historically”, I mean “before the US existed to be compared with”.)
>It also appears to be a lot about the lifestyle and not just get in, do your study, get your degree.
This kind of combines two things. There is the idea of “don’t just get in and do your study”. There’s a lot of disagreement about that. Many people think of and want college to be a training school for some disciplines, and they often approach it as “get in and get done”. Other people don’t, and favor the more traditional approach of using higher education as a way of being a more generally educated and well-rounded person. Separately, there is the non-academic “lifestyle”. Historically, college was also about the non-academic (and rather elite) lifestyle — but yeah, the “college lifestyle” is a big thing in the US.
>students room with people studying different things
Wait, you group students in dorms by their field of study?
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