Sandwich degree
academic degree or higher education course involving practical work experience in addition to academic study
A sandwich degree, or sandwich course, is an academic degree or higher education course (also known as tertiary education) involving practical work experience in addition to academic study. The work experience is often referred as an industrial placement or internship. Many universities offer sandwich degrees.
Definition
In the United Kingdom, a thick sandwich degree is either a four-year undergraduate course as part of a bachelor's degree, or a five-year postgraduate course as part of a master's degree, and involves a placement year or internship in industry, that is, a sandwich year, normally after the second year at university. A thin sandwich degree involves multiple shorter placement or internship periods rather than an unbroken year.
Similar types of degrees or courses are offered in other countries, particularly France and other Francophone countries.
Placement years are often offered by industrial companies as a route to recruiting graduate employees.
History
The concept was pioneered by Alexander Russell, a Scottish electrical engineer and educator, in the early 20th century. It was articulated in a 1945 report by the Ministry of Education in the United Kingdom which advocated those attending courses at technical colleges would receive a new kind of education in which theoretical studies and industrial training would be interwoven. The term "sandwich" was used in a 1950 National Advisory Council on Education for Industry and Commerce report on possible developments within the further education sector.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7417092. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945 and 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sandwich degree” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.