Laurea
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Italy, the laurea is the main post-secondary academic degree.
Until very recently, lauree took much longer to earn than undergraduate degrees elsewhere in Europe and North America. The 'laurea' required to complete 4 years of bachelor and Ph.D.-level university courses, and also required writing a thesis which, in certain cases, required years of experimental work. Thus laureati are addressed as dottore (for a man) or dottoressa (for a woman), i.e. doctor.
Until the introduction of the dottorato di ricerca in the mid-1980s, the laurea constituted the highest academic degree obtainable in Italy and allowed the holder to acces the highest academic career. Famous scientists Nobel prize winners such as Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia held a laurea in physics as their highest degree. The reason is that the Italian laurea included high-level courses and thesis work which often times were sufficient to prepare for a career in research and academia.
The dottorato di ricerca, which was introduced in the mid-1980s and consisted in 3 years of Ph.D.-level courses and experimental work with thesis, all paid for by the state, gained popularity very slowly because only very few positions were made available by the state because of reasons of funding. Indeed, the Italian Republic has never made the dottorato di ricerca a requirement to become professors in the Italian academy. Beginning 2000, unfunded positions for dottorato di ricerca have been made available, that has allowed a more popular access to the degree.
Spurred by the Bologna process, a major reform was instituted in 1999 to introduce easier university degrees comparable to the bachelors. The ordinary laurea was split into undergraduate (equivalent to a bachelor's degree) and postgraduate studies (equivalent to a master's degree. The new "Laurea triennale" (undergraduate) includes bachelor-level courses, simpler than those of the old "laurea", and its normative time to completion is three years (note that university-bound Italians normally graduate from scuola secondaria superiore, high school, at the age of nineteen). "Laurea triennale" require a small thesis. The laurea specialistica or laurea magistrale (postgraduate) can be taken after a 2-year programme after the laurea triennale and requires a thesis. The dottorato di ricerca is now considered equivalent to a Ph.D.
[edit] See also
- it:Liceo (in Italian)
- Bachelor's degree
