The post in which I make a sweeping generalization on higher education based on two guys whose names start with "Sch"

I learned something from the comments to this Invisible Adjunct post. Someone asked whether the fact that Simon Schama doesn't have a PhD is relevant in discussing Schama's call for historians to write more for the general public. Turns out that "once upon a time, a doctorate wasn't necessary to get an Oxbridge fellowship. Indeed, if you were clever, you went straight to that (think Sir Richard Southern, for example) after undergrad and writing a book or highly-regarded article or two." In other words, doctoral education wasn't necessary to move on in academia.

That got me thinking. Marge Murphy's introduction of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. a few weeks ago here at Swarthmore revealed that Schlesinger's undergraduate honors thesis on Orestes Brownson was published soon after his graduation. Perhaps, back in the good ol' days, undergraduate education did a whole lot more in terms of preparing individuals for academic success. Go to a good university, get a bachelors degree, and you're set. Might the quality of undergraduate education have diminished in the past 60 years as more people go off to college? Might graduate education now be what undergraduate education used to be?

Okay, I'll come clean. I don't think that's what's happened. For one thing, Schlesinger's a special case. Scholars like him don't come along very often. I doubt many of his classmates had their theses published. Also, it helps when your father is Arthur Schlesinger.

Plus, the British system of higher education is considerably different from the American system. Whereas here in the U.S., most people go off to college with barely formed ideas of what they plan on studying, in the U.K, you apply for a particular course right from the start. In that respect, disciplinary specialization begins much earlier. That might account for why British PhDs take approximately three years to complete (in theory) compared to the five to seven years that's more typical in the U.S. (if anyone knows better, please feel free to correct me).

So I'd be shocked to find that my speculation is anywhere close to the truth. There's probably a point somewhere in this post about the danger of drawing conclusions from a limited set of data.

UPDATE: Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber addresses (in a serious way) the shift towards PhDs in British higher education.