Quote:
"As to the usage of A.L.B, it is relatively obscure and is understood clearly only by the tiny minority of the population who know it to be associated with HES. Even at Harvard that's a minority"
How do you know that?
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Harvard awards over 40 different degrees, including several flavors from Harvard College (not just the AB and AM, which is why even graduates of the College might mistake ALB or ALM for one of the alternative varieties).
Harvard follows its own obscure naming conventions, such as AB for a bachelor's degree, Commencement for the graduation ceremony, and many other peculiarities unknown to the general public. If somebody claimed to have a "Doctor of Medical Sciences" degree from Harvard University, you would assume that they earned it at the Harvard Medical School, right? Most people would assume that, Harvard alumni included, but they would be wrong.
Apart from the minority of Harvard and Princeton affiliates, most people haven't heard of "AB" and "AM" degrees, the standard designations in the United States being BA, BS, MA. Most people don't know that the Extension School even exists, and certainly not how its degrees are labelled. They would have no idea what an ALB or ALM is, beyond a willingness to assume that it's a bachelor's degree or master's degree.
At Harvard, the non-extension students learn about degrees offered at their own faculty (the College, Business School, Law School, GSAS, etc) from the student handbooks issued within each program. Unless they go out of their way to research the Extension School, there isn't any place they would naturally come across the initials ALB or ALM or learn that those are HES degrees.
Some of this confusion appears in the record of the UC discussion on Shinagel's proposal to relabel the HES degrees. You can gather from what was written that the degrees at HES were an obscure subject to those undergraduates, and I see no reason to believe that UC members are especially uninformed about Harvard administrative minutiae. The general population knows even less of the Harvard trivia.
Basically, the Extension School is obscure enough at the moment (outside Harvard and to some extent within it) that this AB versus ALB issue can fly under the radar.