ELI5; why does college require so many general educational credits when the majority of the actual studies of the degree is the last two years?

If you’re interested in it (and can afford it…) university programs in the UK and through a lot of Europe are much more highly focused. My engineering degree in the UK featured an entire four credit hours of “not engineering”, and even the engineering is focused - eg from the first year Mechanical, Civil/Structural, Chemical, Electrical, Etc Engineering are all separate programs with a syllabus focused on the specific discipline to the extent that if you want to change from, say, Mech to Struct you need to start over from Year 1.

Upside is you have a highly focused engineering degree that puts you somewhere ahead of a U.S. masters degree in your chosen field, downsides are that you need to be fairly sure what you want to do at age 18, and if you plan to work in the US it can be a pain in the ass getting your degree recognized when getting a license as you have 3x more “engineering” credit hours than you need but may only have half the “not engineering” hours unless you go out of your way to clock them up.

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