On the topic of starting university degrees with very limited or no prior studies on a given topic, I think it's also worth taking into account that the curriculum varies pretty wildly by state in the US. Where other countries have a nationally established curriculum, states are largely allowed to set it on a state-by-state basis. Even within a state, you can have a pretty wide range of what students might actually take. In New York, for example, the
standards are pretty meager. To get your Regents diploma, which is the minimum for graduating from high school, you only need one year of studying a foreign language. To get the honors regents diploma, you need only study three years of study of a single foreign language. Our secondary schools also don't generally offer any degree of specialization, like I've been told is common in other countries. If universities were to expect students to come already having studied their degree track in some depth, they would essentially cut themselves off from a large pool of applicants who lived in a state that just didn't teach to that standard.
I believe my school was pretty exceptional for the time in that we began foreign language studies in 8th grade, with half year survey classes of French and Spanish so that students could try out both languages and decide which one they wanted to study for a year or two in high school. If you were particularly earnest about language learning, or were looking to have something to stand out with on your university applications, you could actually study for all four years of high school in your chosen language, with the final year being a course they offered in conjunction with a local university that conferred university credit upon graduation. That said, most university degrees I'm familiar with only require a single year of study of a foreign language to obtain your degree. Someone can study one year of Spanish in 9th grade, and one more in their first year at university and be completely done with compulsory foreign language education.
I did French and eventually got a 100% on my regents exam and did the university level class, and I found it pretty lacking. The biggest issue, in my opinion, was that there weren't really opportunities to use it outside of class. There weren't any French language books available at either the school or municipal libraries, no access to French language television, and the best you could hope for with films was that the municipal library might buy a Criterion Collection DVD of a French film. To get books at the time, I had to take a train for about 3 hours to get to the one French bookstore in NYC, and a new paperback would cost me about $40, which is a lot to ask of high school kids. By the time you factored in train fare, you were looking at a $60 book you might or might not enjoy.
Until you got to that university class, it seemed like foreign languages just weren't seen as a priority and were taught with the sole aim of getting you to pass the Regents exam for your chosen language. It was a pretty dreadful experience for me, and I felt like I learned more in the year I took off from it and read on my own than the other four years I took it in school combined. There are now more bilingual schools out there, though primarily for Spanish, which is a step in the right direction. For the entirety of my high school studies, it seemed like it was little more than a box to be ticked off and quickly forgotten about, though.
