I’m reading Blazing Cat Fur, and hit an article that explained a study that immigrants to Canada had more degrees than native Canadians, but scored lower than Canadians on literacy scores. “University-educated immigrants have literacy standards, in either English or French, that are similar to Canadians with a high-school diploma, the report, published Tuesday by the C.D. Howe Institute, concluded. It found that immigrants have lower literacy scores than Canadians at every educational level, and also score lower on average than nonimmigrants in numeracy.”
I can’t say that the Howe Institute report particularly surprises me. When I arrived at SDSU over a quarter century ago, I quickly realized that not all college degrees are equal. Within the US, we have regional accreditors – and when colleges aren’t accredited, the transcripts aren’t worth much. When I began teaching in Colorado, the old instructor down the hall explained that he had completed a doctorate from an unaccredited college – and he was still paid and addressed as mister.
Foreign schools are different – one of the answers I received was to treat a Master’s degree from India as equal to an American Bachelor’s degree. Having watched Canada’s immigration, I suspect a lot of their degreed immigrants come from India and Pakistan, and fit with that recommendation.
Einstein’s dissertation consists of 20 pages – including corrections. I’ve seen a 500 page thesis submitted for a Master’s degree. I suspect the best way to rank dissertations and theses is to wait twenty years and then see how many times they have been cited by other researchers.
Russia offers the Kandidat Nauk – similar to our Ph.D. but with less coursework, a degree that can be completed in less time. On the other hand, their Doctor Nauk is a bit more intense than our Ph.D. The differentiation is understandable – I have met several secondary teachers who completed a Ph.D. and went back to a high school classroom. That Ph.D. is the highest research either accomplished, and the dissertation is supervised research. Back to Einstein – his dissertation research – working with Brownian motion – was definitely not his greatest (anyone remembering E=MC squared?).
Not all foreign degrees are weaker than American and Canadian degrees – but it takes a lot of checking to quantify where they all rank.
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