Majoring in a language - how far do you get?

I am curious about those of you who have majored in a language and/or taken the highest possible level of a language through a university, and how far you got in that language. Disregarding relatively arbitrary benchmarks such as passing a test to gain a "certificate of proficiency" in said language with standards NOT set by any standardized system (for example, at my university all of us who had taken four semesters of a language and passed a test thereafter were given stamps of "proficiency" on our transcripts; however, when I got back to learning the language at an institution that followed a different set of standards I was put into a "pre-intermediate" level), I want to know how actually proficient you were when dealing with the language in a real-world setting.

My purpose is to see how university language levels like beginning, intermediate and advanced in different languages measure up to different standards depending on which language it is. I have a sneaking suspicion that (at least in the US) those who take advanced level Spanish or French will come out much more proficient in their language than those who take, say, advanced Dutch. I think there is a discrepancy between what the same levels of language mean within different languages, and I wonder what about the mechanics of those languages makes it so?