The preferred form for degrees is to avoid abbreviation. However, if it is necessary or appropriate to list the degrees an individual has earned, abbreviations are acceptable—often, for the reader’s sake, advisable.

Use “Dr.” before a name only when the person in question has an M.D. or D.V.M. degree; it is assumed that UGA faculty possess the terminal degree in their field.

Use apostrophes when writing bachelor’s and master’s degrees; do not use the genitive when naming the full degree (a Bachelor of Arts degree is a bachelor’s degree). Doctorate is a noun; doctoral is the adjective: you may have a doctorate, or a doctoral degree, but not a doctorate degree.

In alumni publications, to save space, it is acceptable to omit the periods in abbreviated degrees in a class notes section (MBA ’87); do use them elsewhere in feature stories, news stories, etc.: He received an M.B.A. in 1987. In some settings, such as marketing publications, the periods may be omitted as long as it is done consistently for all degrees; “MBA,” in particular, is often written without periods.

For alumni who have earned a dual degree from UGA, either use the slash mark (“/”) between the degrees: Joan Smith (MSW/MPH ’14) was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Social Work and Medicine or write out the names of the degrees: Joan Smith, who earned a dual master’s degree in social work and public health, started building bicycles to improve her mechanical skills.

Note that when the “19” or “20” is omitted from a written year, an apostrophe is used to indicate the contraction: ’87. Many word-processing programs will incorrectly insert a single open-quotation mark, which the writer must manually replace.

The UGA Bulletin has a comprehensive list of degrees and majors.

The Graduate School also maintains a separate list of graduate degree programs.

There are many other degrees, offered by other institutions or by UGA in the past (home economics, commerce).

Degrees