There is no real equivalent to the associate’s degree in Germany, but this is a potentially interesting market for recruiting bachelor’s students. If uni-versities can either recognize these two years as sufficient to entry into the German higher education system or work on their own articulation agree-ments with state community college systems, there may be an opportunity to attract some of the more mobile and talented students in the system.
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6.1 Overview
According to NCES, 1,525,000 bachelor’s degrees were awarded in 2006–
07. The most common degrees are the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and the Bach-elor of Science (BS).
A bachelor’s degree is normally structured to take four academic years, although students with enough Advanced Placement (AP) credits may complete their degrees earlier and there is some movement with in the US to create three-year degrees. Approximately 57% of full-time students complete a bachelor’s degree within six years at the institution where they began their studies, according to the latest statistics by NCES.72 There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of the major differences to Germany is that students do not choose a major until the second or even third year—
and have significant “general education” requirements. After taking a va-riety of courses to determine which subject to major in, a student may be facing another three years of degree requirements. Students may also take time out to work or for personal reasons.
College Board also reports that for students who started in 1999–2000, those who studied at public four-year institutions took an average of 6.2 years to earn a bachelor’s degree and those at private four-year institutions took 5.3 years.73 Completion rates are highest at private not-for-profit
insti-72 US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts, http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40.
73 College Board, “Tuition Increases Continue to Slow at Public Colleges According to the College Board’s 2006 Reports on College Pricing and Financial Aid,” College Board website October 24, 2006, http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/150634.html.
Source: Ausserhofer/Himsel/DAAD
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6 Bac h e l o r ’s D e g r e e
tutions and lowest at for-profit institutions.74 Some US universities are also looking at ways to have students study year-round to complete a degree within three years as a way to deal with rising costs of tuition.
The bachelor’s degree has a unique role in US higher education, as nearly everyone (including future lawyers, doctors, and other professionals) ceives a bachelor’s degree as the first degree. Students are normally not re-quired to choose their majors until their sophomore (second) year or later, and that degree typically contains these general education components that are not related directly to the major.
6.1.1 Admissions Process
As mentioned above, the general high school degree (or its test equiva-lent, the GED) is the primary qualification for university study. Every stu-dent graduating from public or private high school in the US has this qualification.
Some universities have “open admissions,” which means they admit any student with this basic qualification, but the majority have some form of admissions process to select students who will most likely be successful at the institution—and to build a cohort/graduating class that reflects the val-ues of the institution. This may mean that special care and attention is put towards geographic, racial, ethnic, and other forms of diversity. Students rarely are asked to select their majors before entering university, but they do indicate what they think they will study, which can help the university distribute new students across disciplines as well. Different universities may have different entry requirements, both in terms of grades and in terms of subjects that a student needs to have covered at the high school level.
6.1.1.1 Standardized Tests
Most universities require some form of standardized test for admissions.
The most popular of these is the College Board–administered Standard-ized Admissions Test (SAT). The other test, used primarily in the Midwest and West, is the ACT (originally an acronym for American College Testing) test. Both tests are meant to provide some form of information that can be compared across students coming from diverse high school programs, but they have always been criticized for favoring students who are simply good at taking these kinds of tests—as well as students who can afford expensive, and often effective, tutoring.
74 US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Fast Facts, http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40.
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6.1.1.2 Admissions Criteria
While grades (reported as the “grade point average” or GPA) and stan-dardized test scores often establish a baseline for admissions, meaning that students below a certain level of one or both will not be admitted, they are not viewed in isolation. Other criteria for admissions, beyond the diversity concerns mentioned above, generally include recommendation letters from teachers, interviews, an essay or personal statement, commu-nity service (volunteering), and participation in high school activities such as sports, student government, and music. There is usually also some bias towards children of alumni and, reportedly, children of wealthy individuals who the university hopes will contribute financially to the institution.
6.1.1.3 Application Timeline
Students do most of their research for bachelor’s degree programs through advisors at their high school, the Internet, or by speaking with teachers, peers, and family. This research generally begins at least a year in advance of the application deadlines, so roughly one-and-a-half years before a pro-gram begins.
Some students in the US will apply in the fall before their first year for
“early decision” programs that allow them to receive early notification of their acceptance, but most students apply in January and the unofficial deadline in the US for students to make a decision—and send their down-payments—is May 1.
In order to compete with offers from US institutions, universities in Ger-many would need to both move up their deadlines as well as plan care-fully for the important time period between when a student receives an acceptance letter and when he or she makes the decision. In the US, this is where some of the most important and compelling marketing efforts take place, such as calls from existing students, campus visits, other events, etc.
6.1.2 Majors and General Education
Students must fulfill some form of general education requirements and have at least one academic major. Minors and dual majors are not uncom-mon. Future doctors, dentists, or veterinarians generally follow some form of “pre-med” requirements that must be fulfilled in addition to those of their academic majors. These will help students gain entry into veterinary or medical programs, which, in the US, are only offered at the gradu-ate level. Relatively inflexible curriculum requirements, particularly in the natural sciences and engineering, are among the primary barriers to study abroad for undergraduate students in the US. While there are also “pre-law” programs and future lawyers tend to major in subjects like political science, law schools welcome applications from students with a wide vari-ety of disciplinary backgrounds.
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It is not impossible to switch from one field to another after the bachelor’s degree and the choice of a particular undergraduate degree will, in many cases, not restrict students to any particular career track or further gradu-ate studies. A student receiving a BA in Russian literature, for example, may have the same shot at an entry-level job at McKinsey & Company or Goldman Sachs as the student with a BA in economics; both will also be expected to stay for only a couple of years before earning an MBA and coming back in a more senior position. A student with a BA in political sci-ence, for example, may be admitted to a PhD program in economics with some additional coursework requirements.
While there is still a strong and growing tendency in the US to major in sub-jects that will directly lead to future employment or admission into profes-sional programs, this relative flexibility in the system leads to US students having a sense that the choice of bachelor’s program or major is less impor-tant than German students do. This sense of the bachelor’s degree being the time where skills such as critical thinking, writing, and problem-solving are developed more than a real expertise in one field is somewhat built into the US philosophy of liberal arts and the importance of general education.
The following figure illustrates the distribution of fields of study or aca-demic major:75
0 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000
46,940 Health professions and related clinical sciences Psychology Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and
humanities
Source: NCES76
75 US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 2009, Table 271, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_271.asp.
76 Ibid.
Figure 8: Number of Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded by Field of Study, 2007–08
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6.2 Study Abroad
When US institutions think about “study abroad,” it is almost always in the context of the bachelor’s degree. In particular, as mentioned above, the administrative structures that support study abroad, such as the study abroad office, are often charged with exclusively serving the undergradu-ate population for a variety of administrative reasons.
The section on “Trends in US Study Abroad” (see p. 67) provides a more comprehensive overview of study abroad in the US, but some of the pri-mary trends related to the bachelor’s degree include:
Continued shift to short-term programs of six weeks or less;
More diverse degrees represented, particularly an emphasis on in-creasing study abroad for students in the sciences and engineering;
An emphasis on less traditional destinations;
Shift from smaller bilateral exchange programs to sending larger numbers on a university’s own programs abroad or with third-party providers; and
Integrated study abroad programs such as joint and dual degrees (al-though this is still quite rare at the bachelor’s level).
Research internships abroad are quickly growing in popularity as they capitalize on two major trends at universities to promote under-graduate research as well as study abroad – and give students the sense that they can add important international experience to their resumes and try out high-level research before committing to a PhD.
The quick growth of DAAD’s RISE (Research Internships in Science and Engineering) program has been observed and is now being emu-lated in bilateral relations, within consortia, and by other scholarship-granting organizations.