Undergraduate and Professional Education in America

Abstract

Unlike Korean universities, many subjects such as law, medicine, business administration and library science are, by and large, for professional education at a graduate level in American universities. Naturally our intellectual curiosity naturally leads us to a number of interesting questions like those of what is meant by "professional," why a professional education is conducted at the graduate level (or what is wrong with undergraduate "professional" education), what (quality) is expected of students of a professional school to acquire through their undergraduate education (or what lacks) at the undergraduate level if they are admitted to a professional school right after graduation from their high schools, and how professional "education" is differentiated from other or non-professional university instructions and trainings on the one hand and from trade trainings on the other. Another thing to consider is whether American solutions to these questions which we are going to find out soon would be simply the reflections of typical or stereo-typical American ways of thinking related to university organization or carry such universal validity or quality to be targets for emulation in other countries.