The United States Bachelors degree is a 120 credit hour undergraduate degree taking four and sometimes 5 years to complete. Well….
A little birdy told me about an unusual blog site celebrating Indian 90 credit hour (3 year) engineering degrees now being accepted in the United States as fully accredited.
In a significant development, Indian engineering degrees will now be accredited in the United States and will be internationally recognised.
This follows India’s induction into the prestigious Washington Accord, an international agreement between registering bodies of member countries accrediting academic engineering programmes, at the university level, leading to the practice of engineering at the full professional level.
and this lovely statement:
The really great significance of this is what we call credit transfer and mobility.
Like in the US, if you do two years at one institution, two other semesters somewhere else and graduate from a different university or college or institution, all of these credits will be accepted by all of the member countries that are a party to this accord
From any evaluation of universities, such as Academic Ranking of World Universities one can see that the United States is the most dominant in higher education.
Yet this article suggests many top tier United States universities are accepting this 90 credit hour degree.
We surveyed a sample of regionally accredited universities in the United States to establish their policy on acceptance of the three-year Indian degree for entry to a Master’s program. Among the universities which were prepared to consider an applicant holding this qualification with an appropriately distinguished academic record were,
Harvard University • Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) • Georgetown University • I.M.P.A.C. University • Huntingdon College of Health Sciences • The American Graduate School of Management • Ashworth College (if evaluated as equivalent by an acceptable foreign credential evaluator) • Grantham University • Hult International Business School • New York Chiropractic College • Kellogg Business School ( Northwestern University) • Fuqua Business School ( Duke University) • Tuck Business School ( Dartmouth University) • Goizueta Business School ( Emory University) • Carnegie Mellon University • Aspen University
and be aware there is a 90 credit hour degree from Europe as well, called the Bologna bachelor’s degree
Now look at this goal
The Convention calls on member states to promote, encourage and facilitate the recognition of credentials earned outside of their borders to encourage the mobility of students and professionals
and here is our Government
Between 2005 and 2006, the percentage of schools saying the European three-year degree was “not an issue” rose from 41 percent to 56 percent
So, what about Americans? Can a U.S. 120 credit hour Bachelor’s degree be accepted directly into a European PhD program? Can a U.S. BS degree be accepted directly into an Indian graduate school? Will an American obtain funding for graduate school as they could in the United States with a Bachelors?
Accreditation is a serious game. It means a career, the money to earn the first degree, the time it takes to complete, never mind a level a mastery that is implied. So, by all of this need to trade students are American Bachelors degrees being devalued?
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