Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts is the standard undergraduate liberal arts bachelor's degree. At Columbia, it is granted by the Faculty of Arts & Sciences through Columbia College and the the School of General Studies. The standard time to completion for a Bachelor of Arts in Columbia College is eight semesters, for a total of 124 credits. Some have done this in three years or less. Others, like super seniors, have taken up to five years.

History

The Bachelor of Arts was first granted at King's College in 1758. The formal name for the degree is Artium Baccalaureus, a Latin phase that signifies the European heritage of the degree as well as the medieval conception of the "seven liberal arts" of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. For many years, the degree granted by Columbia College was denoted A.B.

This appears to have changed in recent years (though transcripts provided by the Registrar's office still denote the program of study as A.B.) to the more conventional B.A. The Latin itself on the degree has also changed to Baccalaureus in Artibus, a phrase that instead of meaning Bachelor of Arts, now translates into Bachelor in Arts by replacing the (correct) genitive plural of ars with the (incorrect) ablative plural. Ergo, the degree is wrong. Sorry, kids.