I’ve been trying to find out what it all means, like there’s Bachelor’s degree, Doctorate, Bachelor of Design and Master of Education. But what do they mean? Is a bachelor’s degree the lowest degree you can get and master’s is the highest or do different courses have different names for their degrees?
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The progression is: high school diploma / GED, associates degree, bachelors degree, masters degree, doctorate.
Primary education is considered to be the level of education that children require in order to become young adults / teens in society. You need to be able to read and write competently, do basic math, and be acquainted with the world (know basic geography, understand enough to engage in pop culture, etc).
Primary education is often broken down into stages:
* pre-school – any form of schooling from birth prior to kindergarten, the final year being Pre-Kindergarten or Pre-K
* elementary school – K-2, kindergarten being the beginning of formal education, usually focusing on socialization with other kids and following a basic schedule of learning, followed by the first levels of “graded” education, meaning that your performance is assessed with a grade)
* grade school (for some reason) – grades 3-5
* junior high school (aka “intermediate school”) – grades 6-8
Secondary education, aka high school, means that you know enough to enter an apprenticeship for a trade (or enough to enter a trade school). On this path, it’s often sufficient to get a GED that proves you have the knowledge equivalent to someone with a high school diploma.
Alternatively, completing secondary education can also be “preparatory” in nature, i.e., you’re not aiming at a trade but you want to pursue college. Today because of the proliferation of the idea that everyone should go to college, most secondary education is taken for granted as preparatory, but usually the only schools that are called “prep schools” are those that have traditionally aimed at that path even many decades ago.
Then there’s post-secondary education, which is all the rest of the degrees I listed above. These degrees are obtained at some kind of post-secondary institution, a junior college, a college, or a university.
Associates degrees are typically not offered at colleges or universities, normally they are only offered by junior colleges in the form of a two year program. These are thought of as establishing a baseline general education in the liberal arts with some kind of concentration, akin to a “minor” at college / university.
Bachelors degrees are earned at colleges or universities, and these are four year degrees that require students to complete a rigorous baseline education and a “major,” which is a course of study in some specialization. The “baseline education” I’m talking about is normally fulfilled in the form of completing what are called “distribution requirements,” basically these are a set of requirements that *all* students claiming this degree must complete regardless of your major.
What does that baseline look like? It depends on the college you attend! If you go to a liberal arts college (e.g., Grinnell), the baseline education you complete in addition to your major is based on the idea that a well-rounded individual should have training across a wide range of liberal arts and sciences. At a college of arts and sciences, or a liberal arts college, the distros look like literature, foreign language, psychology, economics, some “hard science” like bio/chem/physics, some level of math, etc.
But if you go to a technical or engineering college (e.g. Caltech), the distribution requirements look somewhat different. There will be some overlap, but the emphasis will be shifted onto the natural sciences and mathematics as the core. These schools still have non-technical requirements, but for instance instead of a two year foreign language requirement they might only require one year. Instead of 3 or 4 credits in history and literature, an engineering school might only require one credit each.
What’s the difference between a college and a university? A college is an institution with a set of distribution requirements that all students must complete. A university is a collection of colleges. For example, if you go to Northwestern, they have seven different colleges: a liberal arts college, an engineering college, a journalism school, a school of music, etc. The benefit of a university is that if you enroll in, say, the engineering college at Northwestern, the distribution requirements will be set by that college and be focused on natural sciences and math, but there are still requirements in liberal arts as well like foreign language, history, literature. Because all of the colleges belong to the same university, the students can enroll in any class to satisfy their degree requirements offered by any college. So engineering students take classes in the liberal arts school to satisfy those requirements and vice versa.
Because of the wide range of offerings at most colleges and universities, colleges can offer additional certifications. You can graduate with a major degree but also add a minor, or complete an honors course of study (and graduate “with honors”) or both, and have a “bachelors in computer science with honors and a minor in Russian literature.” In most cases completing an honors program on top of your major means that you wrote a thesis in that field of study to some high standard. If you have a major and a minor, you might be able to get honors in both, even. You can also double major … if you complete all of the distribution requirements and the major requirements for two major courses of study, then you double majored. You can get honors for each one if you want. Some overachievers do a double major and a minor and even complete honors on one of more of those.
If you attend a university, it’s also possible to get a degree from two different colleges. For example if you went to Northwestern, you could get a degree from the school of music in percussion and a degree in civil engineering from the engineering college. Or you could double major in one of those schools, etc, etc. Depending on how many courses you’re willing to take and how long you’re willing to attend, you can just keep collecting degrees, majors, and minors if you want.
Advanced degrees begin with the master’s degree. Here, you are really focusing on *professional specialization*, meaning that you intend to get a professional job (i.e., not an academic or research job) that requires a high degree of education. This would be people that lead businesses (MBA) or big projects (masters in engineering or natural science, etc).
If you intend to work in research, either professional or academic, this means that you need to go beyond “mastering” the body of knowledge in a field; at this point you intend to *grow* the body of knowledge in that field. For that, a doctorate is typically required.
Note that medical doctors, MDs, are so respected because that profession is considered to require not just mastering what is known at the time of graduation, but to be conversant enough with the field to continue staying on top of it as time goes on, hence it is one of the fields that requires a doctorate level of knowledge just to graduate. From there you go on into residency where you learn the actual practice of medicine, i.e., applying what you know without killing people. Another field akin to this is lawyer, a Juris Doctor or JD is required to practice law, but this is not really researching or adding to the body of knowledge about law so much as proving you know enough to stay abreast of it, since it is constantly changing.
Beyond doctorate level, there are post-doctoral studies in many fields. In fundamental research, for example, it’s typical to do post-doc positions where you essentially apprentice in a research lab for a professor and, like a doctor in residency, learn the practical art of doing actual research; contributing actual knowledge to that field.
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