Sexist Terms

I received a burning inquiry from one of my students this week:

Gloria,
As a Liberated Woman and Feminist Supporter, can you work your magic on somehow getting our Education System to reword degrees, i.e.:
4 Years of College called "Bachelor's Degree."
How about Bachelorette or some other "unisex" name (which I know you could supply). Sensible Degree would work for me.

Then there's MASTER's Degree, should there be both with MISTRESS Degree, or again some ingenious unisex descriptive name like Debtors Degree (with Student Loans)_________or more seriously...SMART Degree?
Doctor I'm okay with... What can you come up with?
I seriously think this should be corrected; we no longer call CongressWomen CongressMen.
Help, a Sista' out. Wonder if I'm the only one who thinks about this stuff?

Crystal

I don’t think Crystal is alone in thinking about these things. I’m sure I thought about it, too, when I graduated from college more than 20 years ago and received my Bachelor’s degree. That means I became a “bachelor.” The most common definition for this is an unmarried man. Another definition listed is a graduate of a 4 year college program.

I’m also a “Master.” I received my Master’s degree about 10 years ago. This is not really a gender-neutral term, either. There is a feminine equivalent to this, which is Mistress. Of course the most common meaning of this word is very negative in our modern society, and if I said I was a Mistress, no one would think I was referring to an academic accomplishment.

So we need some better terms which are not laden with masculine imagery.

There are 4 academic degrees: associate, bachelor, master, and doctor. Who can think of some good names? Small, medium, large, and extra large? Tall, grande, venti, venti, and superiore?
I’m going to have to consider this, because the best I can come up with are mundane, but accurate and gender-neutral:
Academic Level 1, 2, 3, or 4, or
Undergraduate level 1, or 2, and Graduate level 1 or 2.

Student: Great News, Grandma, I have achieved academic level 3!
Grandma: (yawn).

Not titles to aspire to. Please send me some suggestions and help us out, here!