Ask Lemmy

Probably varies largely on where you're talking about, and even then, which university program you're looking at enrolling in. If you go and look at universities in the UK, for example, a BA studying a foreign language generally seems to assume that this is a language you've already been studying for several years in secondary education. You're meant to be entering the program with roughly a B1 level in the language, and allegedly develop up to C1 over the course of 3 years of study. Meanwhile, in the US, you can rock up to a university and be a Japanese language major with nothing more than "Well, he says he likes anime and his grades are okay." and the degree program will start you off in a 100-level class that expects negligible prior knowledge, if any.

Then again, having attempted university in the US, and now doing it at a UK school, university education is pretty drastically different. The US schools take 4 years to grant the same degree, and you spend almost the whole of the first year and a good chunk of the second just doing general education requirements that are, at best, only tangentially relevant to your chosen field of study. If I were doing my current degree program for a BA in French and Spanish as a first time student in the US, unless I did a bunch of AP courses or took night classes at a community college on the side, I'd need to do a general English composition class, a few math classes, probably get to pick between a biology or chemistry course, something to do with world cultures or music and the arts, and a handful of other electives I'm forgetting about. For that degree in the UK, from start to finish over the course of 3 years, I exactly 2 modules that aren't either French or Spanish, with one being the "Hey, we need to make sure you can actually write in English competently, too" module, and the other being a free choice of an introductory language module for something else.

I'd also assume the US' lack of a national curriculum also plays into how things work out with universities here, as well. Since things can be so variable at a regional and local level, not only in terms of the established curriculum, but what courses your particular secondary school has the funding to offer, universities can't really assume much of incoming students' education. You can have a kid from one state whose school was a Spanish language immersion school offering bilingual education from day 1 of Kindergarten, and later offering French, German, Japanese and Arabic as a third language for the final 4 years of compulsory education sat side-by-side with another from a different part of the country who only had the chance to take 2 years of Spanish classes. Even for subjects with a better baseline, someone whose studies covered all the available math classes up to geometry and algebra is going to have a totally different starting point from another whose school partnered with a local college to offer college level courses in calculus and statistics in high school.