in the case of engineering, to the Washington Accord – an international agreement between engineering regulatory bodies to recognise professional degrees accredited in each country – signed originally in 1989 by the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, and since expanded to include many other countries. In the twenty-first century, the standard professional degree for many science and engineering fields was raised from bachelor's to master's level, including for qualification as a Chartered Physicist (from 2001), Chartered Scientist (from 2004) and Chartered Engineer (from 2012). History of professional degrees in the United States The Bachelor of Medicine, or M.B., was the first medical degree to be granted in the United States and Canada. The first medical schools that granted the M.B. degree were at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Columbia University was the first American university to grant the M.D. degree in 1770, although, as in England, this followed the M.B. (which was the qualifying degree) and required completion of a thesis. Professional societies started licensing doctors from the 1760s, and in the early nineteenth century started setting up their own medical schools, known as proprietary medical colleges, the first being the medical college of the Medical Society of the County of New York, which opened March 12, 1807. These eliminated the general education and long lecture terms of the university schools, making them much more popular. Without effective regulation, abuses arose, and national conventions in 1846 and 1847 led to the establishment of the American Medical Association. This new body set the first nationwide standards for M.D. degrees, requiring that students had a liberal education in arts and sciences as part of their degree, that they had served an apprenticeship before starting the course, and that the course lasted three years. The M.D. was thus the first entry-level professional degree to be awarded as a purely trade school "doctor" degree in the United States, before the first European-style doctorate, the Ph.D., was awarded by an American institution in 1861, although the M.D. was not established as a post-baccalaureate degree until much later. The President of Yale, Arthur Twining Hadley, stated in the early 20th century that: "However convenient it might be to insist on the possession of a bachelor's degree by all pupils in the schools of law or medicine, I feel that it would be a violation of our duty to these professions to