An engineer's degree is an advanced academic degree in engineering which is conferred in Europe, some countries of Latin America, North Africa and a few institutions in the United States. The degree may require a thesis but always requires a non-abstract project. North America Canada Through the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB), Engineers Canada accredits Canadian undergraduate engineering programs that meet the standards of the profession. Graduates of those programs are deemed by the profession to have the required academic qualifications to pursue further training towards becoming a licensed professional engineer in Canada. In Canada, a CEAB-accredited engineer degree is the minimum academic requirement for registration as a P.Eng (professional engineer) anywhere in Canada and the standard against which all other engineering academic qualifications are measured. A graduate of a non-CEAB-accredited program must demonstrate that his or her education is at least equivalent to that of a graduate of a CEAB-accredited program. United States In the United States, the engineer's degree requires a year of study beyond a master's degree or two years from a bachelor's degree and often includes a requirement for a research thesis. At the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School the thesis is required to be "more extensive and complete in problem scope and solution than a master's thesis", although "not necessarily meeting the test of original research and contribution to fundamental knowledge that is applied to PhD dissertations." At UCLA, the engineer degree is explicitly set at the level of the preliminary PhD examination, i.e. not including the contribution to fundamental knowledge. The engineer's degree was originally a first degree at the same level as a bachelor's degree. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was empowered by its 1824 charter to award Civil Engineer and Topographical Engineer degrees alongside the Bachelor in Science, and awarded the first Civil Engineer degrees in 1835. Civil Engineer degrees were also awarded by Dartmouth College (from 1845), the University of Michigan (from 1855) and by Yale University (from 1860), while Columbia University awarded Engineer of Mines degrees from 1867. By the early 20th-century engineer's degrees were commonly at graduate level – a survey by a committee of the Association of American Universities in 1916 found that this was the case in over two-thirds of the universities surveyed. The committee recommended that engineer's degrees be reserved for study beyond master's level. Latin America In Latin America, a degree or title of "Ingeniero" is awarded after