An undergraduate degree (also called first degree or simply degree) is an academic degree taken by an undergraduate. It is usually offered at an institution of higher education, such as a university. The most common type of undergraduate degree is the bachelor's degree, which typically takes three or four years to complete.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the degree of bachelor is the most common type of undergraduate degree, though, confusingly, there are also some master's degrees.

North America

First professional degrees sometimes contain the word 'Doctor', but are still considered to be undergraduate degrees in most countries, including Canada. For example, the Doctor of Medicine (MD) program in Canada is considered an undergraduate degree. However, in the United States, most first professional degrees are considered graduate programs by the U.S. Department of Education and require students to already possess an undergraduate degree before admission.USNEI-Structure of U.S. Education - Graduate/Post Education Levels: Graduate Postsecondary Education These degrees are not research doctorates and not equivalent to the Ph.D.USNEI-Structure of U.S. Education - Graduate/Post Education Levels: First-Professional Studies Many countries offer bachelors degrees that are equivalent to American graduate degrees, for example the M.D. degree offered in the U.S. is equivalent to the MBBS or MBChB degree.

In the United States and rarely in Canada, an Associate's Degree is a two-year degree. It is occasionally undertaken as the beginning of a four-year degree. When doing so, a student transferring to a four-year institution can have difficulty in convincing the receiving institution to acknowledge his previous coursework so that he does not need to repeat a course. Problems are not limited to specific class requirements, but also to requisites for graduation and pre-requisites of the new institution. Such a situation can cause the transferring student to remain in the larger institution longer than originally intended. Some two-year institutions have transfer agreements with four-year institutions, which specify which courses will transfer without problems.

See also

• British undergraduate degree classification