So I went to school in a country that is notorious for forcing kids to specialize early - the UK. In my age cohort, at age sixteen we had to pick just three subjects to study for the next two years. I chose 'pure and applied mathematics' as one of those three subjects. Some people chose 'pure mathematics' and 'applied mathematics' as Two of their subjects. I guess, vaguely, that doing the expanded applied maths would have included more calculus (not sure what that might have entailed - more second order differential equation stuff maybe?) - but there was definitely no point where I was faced with the choice of 'should I do a bit of calculus, or a lot of calculus?'. 16 year olds are not good at knowing how much calculus they need to learn. I was pretty happy just choosing 'do I want to learn some mathematics, no mathematics, or a lot of mathematics?' - and leaving it up to the school to figure out how much calculus to include. Based on my career since, the amount of calculus included was, it turns out, 'enough'.

Worth noting that the Scottish education system is different - people do 5 or 6 highers at 16/17 and those are used for university entrance rather than 3 A-levels at 17/18.

Scottish first degrees are 4 years rather than 3 in England - presumably to allow for this.