History of professional degrees in the United States

History of professional degrees in the United States[edit]

The Bachelor of Medicine, or M.B., was the first medical degree to be granted in the United States and Canada. The first medical schools that granted the M.B. degree were at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Columbia University was the first American university to grant the M.D. degree in 1770, although, as in England, this followed the M.B. (which was the qualifying degree) and required completion of a thesis.^[24][25][26] Professional societies started licensing doctors from the 1760s, and in the early nineteenth century started setting up their own medical schools, known as proprietary medical colleges, the first being the medical college of the Medical Society of the County of New York, which opened March 12, 1807. These eliminated the general education and long lecture terms of the university schools, making them much more popular. Without effective regulation, abuses arose, and national conventions in 1846 and 1847 led to the establishment of the American Medical Association. This new body set the first nationwide standards for M.D. degrees, requiring that students had a liberal education in arts and sciences as part of their degree, that they had served an apprenticeship before starting the course, and that the course lasted three years.^[27]

The M.D. was thus the first entry-level professional degree to be awarded as a purely trade school "doctor" degree in the United States, before the first European-style doctorate, the Ph.D., was awarded by an American institution in 1861,^[28] although the M.D. was not established as a post-baccalaureate degree until much later.^[29] The President of Yale, Arthur Twining Hadley, stated in the early 20th century that: "However convenient it might be to insist on the possession of a bachelor's degree by all pupils in the schools of law or medicine, I feel that it would be a violation of our duty to these professions to hedge ourselves about by any such artificial limitations."^[30] This changed (for medicine) after Abraham Flexner's damning report into the state of medical education in 1910: by 1930 almost all medical schools required a previous liberal arts degree before starting the M.D. course.^[27]

Law degrees were introduced in the US by the College of William & Mary in 1792, with its "Batchellor of Law" (sic) (L.B.) degree. This was followed by the "Graduate of Law" at the University of Virginia in 1829, which became the first American LL.B. in 1840. The J.D. was introduced by the University of Chicago in 1902, with the same curriculum as the LL.B. but requiring a previous B.A. or B.S. for entry. The J.D. spread, but encountered opposition, and Harvard, which imposed graduate entry as a requirement for its LL.B. course in 1909, and Yale used the name for their post-LL.B. degree, elsewhere called the LL.M. By the 1930s, when most law schools had shifted to graduate entry, the standard degree was once again the LL.B. The second shift to the J.D., again without a change of curriculum, came in the 1960s, with all American Bar Association–accredited professional degrees adopting the nomenclature by 1971.^[31]

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, other professions, particularly in clinical fields, transitioned their professional degrees to doctorates, following the example of the M.D. and J.D. The Master of Public Health (M.P.H. degree) and the Doctor of Public Health (Dr.P.H.) are multi-disciplinary professional degrees awarded for studies in areas related to public health. The M.P.H. degree focuses on public health practice, as opposed to research or teaching. In the 1990s there was also some debate in the architectural community about renaming the professional degree in architecture a "doctorate".^[32] The spread of professional doctorates raised concerns about the standards of the new degrees, particularly in cases such as physical therapy, where the standard set by the American Physical Therapy Association for the doctorate is the same as that for the master's degree. Critics have claimed that these degrees should not be called doctorates, pointing out that a Ph.D. takes an average of twelve years from the start of college, compared to five and a half to eight years for professional doctorates, while defenders of the new professional doctorates have said the point of comparison should be the M.D. and J.D., not the Ph.D.^[33]

Professional degrees by country

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