What is a college in the US?
Scott SouthPublished: Jul 17, 2007 5:48 AM | Updated: Jan 29, 2008 10:21 AM
Su Hui Hsing's essay on life at Smith College is interesting and probably very informative for Malaysians who are mostly familiar with the British - as opposed to American - higher education system. I have a graduate degree in higher-education administration, and I guessed that the writer's college was Smith long before I saw the credits at the bottom of her article.
Not because I am clever; rather, because each of the elite US institutions has its own quirky personality and character, and Su brought that out rather well. Of course, Smith is one of the Seven Sisters; the others are Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Radcliffe (now fully merged with Harvard), Vassar, and Barnard. Four of them are in Massachusetts, by the way.
For the benefit of her Malaysian readers who keep pestering her with the assumption that a college is inferior to a university, Su might have stated more directly that in the US, a four-year college is the same thing as a university in terms of the bachelor's degree and, indeed, that the terms are interchangeable: Boston College, for example, is a Ph.D.-granting university, as is Dartmouth College, while some institutions with 'University' in their names offer only the bachelor's degree.
Her passing mention that 'all of these (leading US) universities started admitting women in the 1970s' is only partially correct and highly misleading. The University of Michigan is, among others, a leading university, and this institution began admitting women in 1870, not 1970. Women were commonly attending elite colleges and universities by the 1930s, though not in the numbers of their male classmates. A woman friend of mine was a graduating medical student in 1976; at that time, women made up one-third of all med students. And non-Americans should be reminded that medical school in the US is strictly a post-bachelor-degree, post-graduate school and that it takes at least eight years to get the MD degree beginning from the freshman year. So these women, as a generation that comprised one-third of all med students, would have needed many years to reach such a critical mass - long before the 1970s. Today, of course, the gender ratio in med schools is more like 50/50.
In any case, Su's piece is long overdue in Malaysia. The Saudi royal family has known for generations where to send their daughters for an elite university education while insulating themselves from males - to one of the Seven Sisters. Most Malaysians still don't know what a college is in the United States.
Not because I am clever; rather, because each of the elite US institutions has its own quirky personality and character, and Su brought that out rather well. Of course, Smith is one of the Seven Sisters; the others are Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Radcliffe (now fully merged with Harvard), Vassar, and Barnard. Four of them are in Massachusetts, by the way.
For the benefit of her Malaysian readers who keep pestering her with the assumption that a college is inferior to a university, Su might have stated more directly that in the US, a four-year college is the same thing as a university in terms of the bachelor's degree and, indeed, that the terms are interchangeable: Boston College, for example, is a Ph.D.-granting university, as is Dartmouth College, while some institutions with 'University' in their names offer only the bachelor's degree.
Her passing mention that 'all of these (leading US) universities started admitting women in the 1970s' is only partially correct and highly misleading. The University of Michigan is, among others, a leading university, and this institution began admitting women in 1870, not 1970. Women were commonly attending elite colleges and universities by the 1930s, though not in the numbers of their male classmates. A woman friend of mine was a graduating medical student in 1976; at that time, women made up one-third of all med students. And non-Americans should be reminded that medical school in the US is strictly a post-bachelor-degree, post-graduate school and that it takes at least eight years to get the MD degree beginning from the freshman year. So these women, as a generation that comprised one-third of all med students, would have needed many years to reach such a critical mass - long before the 1970s. Today, of course, the gender ratio in med schools is more like 50/50.
In any case, Su's piece is long overdue in Malaysia. The Saudi royal family has known for generations where to send their daughters for an elite university education while insulating themselves from males - to one of the Seven Sisters. Most Malaysians still don't know what a college is in the United States.
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