Is the primary purpose of undergraduate education prep for grad school?

[Kron3007]

Thanks for sharing this question. I know our teaching university wrestles with this quite a bit as we do have a population of students who are planning graduate or professional school and a population that is planning directly to career. Some of our program have kind of solved the problem with degree paths that intentionally geared to grad school preparation and paths that are intentionally geared to career.

How many different courses are there typically between these two paths? Do they other things like internships that distinguish them from each other?

I'm in a STEM field, so for our program, that means an algebra-calculus-physics-ochem focused pathway with highly targeted curriculum and very few elective choices, one of which is an independent research option for the grad school cohort; internships for the med school cohort. For the more headed to careers available with a Bacc degree it means a more stats based pathway with more electives that can be targeted to the potential interest of the student. These are the students who are actually more likely to do practica to gain work experience.

I think we accomplish the same objective (and more) by building a lot of flexibility into our program rather than having discrete paths.  We include a lot of restricted electives so that they can choose the disciplinary focus as well as select more research based options (undergrad thesis and other research based courses), co-op placements to work with industry, or the "standard" path. This provides a lot of options to prepare them for various paths, or somewhere in the middle if they like.

As for the original question, I suspect this partially depends on the field.  In my field, there are a lot of non-academic career paths, so most of our students are not planning to go to grad school or even be involved directly in research.  As a result, the focus of our undergrad programs are not really to prepare students for grad school, although that is definitely important as well.   

[Hibush]

I'm in an applied science field with a strong graduate program. We do not consider the undergrad program to be primarily for grad-school preparation. But we can do that for those who want it. The idea is to value and support all options.

Our undergraduates mostly go into industry, and very happily so. Those who are interested in graduate school have the opportunity to get good preparation through focused upper-division coursework and research experiences. They end up in appropriate grad programs for their career aspirations, whether those are in commercial R&D or academics.

For those at PUIs that focus on grad school, what drives that focus? To what extent is it faculty firsthand familiarity with careers? How much is it to match the school's marketing to recruits and their parents?