German universities moved towards more professional teaching in the nineteenth century, and unlike American students, who still pursued a liberal education, students elsewhere started to take professional courses in the first or second year of study.[16] In the early twentieth century, American liberal arts colleges still required students to pursue a common curriculum, whereas public universities allowed a student to move on to more pragmatic courses after having taken general education courses for the first two years of study. As an emphasis on specialized knowledge grew in the middle of the century, colleges began to adjust the proportion of required general education courses to those required for a particular major.[17]