Graduate School Education
An online college is a great place to earn a graduate degree while you still work full time!
Graduate school education is also known as postgraduate or quaternary education. It is based on studying for a degree or other needed qualification.
Graduate school education involves 4 qualification types, including vocational degrees, academic degrees, academic diplomas/certificates, and vocational diplomas/certificates. Degrees are pretty standard in Western countries.
The first level is the foundation or associate’s degree which requires up to 2 years of study, involving 60 semester credits or 240 foundation credits. The second is the bachelor degree which requires up to 4 years of study, requiring up to 120 semester credits or 360 foundation credits. The third is the master’s or terminal degree, requiring up to 7 or more years of study with varied credit levels depending on the area of study. The fourth is a professional degree which requires up to 4 years of study, is required to get a professional license or gain entry into a specified school or career, and can result in students being able to call themselves doctors. The fifth graduate school education degree is the doctorate, requiring up to 12 more years of study, and resulting in the title of doctor, letters after a person’s name, professional status, and the ability for students to teach in their field of study. However, there are also honorary degrees, awarded for specified recognition in their field of work and non-degree awards such as certificates and diplomas.
A graduate school education is mandatory for any professional level job. To become a lawyer, doctor, engineer, teacher, or other professional, graduate school education provides the foundations, training, theory and practical applications that are unavoidable in these jobs. However, there is some debate as to why graduate school education is being used for what used to be vocations such as journalism, where to this day, in the media world, old-fashioned experience is far more valuable and in many cases only achievable through cold hard experience and intuition, something which it is argued cannot be taught in a degree course. Despite this, the need for graduate school education is mandatory for many jobs and as human knowledge expands, the need for further degrees in new areas of study is increasing.