I have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you will not realize contains its own tradition and its own truth. You will be stuck in a very narrow, and, frankly, uncritical interpretation. It was Hegel’s fundamental insight (into Kant) that any epistemology fundamentally requires the enclosure of the problem of ontology; that, on account of the schema, the entire Critique of Pure Reason is such an enclosure—-but we cannot genuinely go beyond such an enclosure if we view everything from within it, ie “analytically.”

The average American philosophy undergrad gets very little of any philosopher pre-Russell other than a very skewed review of Aristotle. I have no idea about Canada, and there are some exceptions in the US, but average philosophy undergrad will get a very cursory skimming of pre-analytic thought, with basically none I've ever met having read Kant's first Critique, much less Hegel or any 20th century continental philosopher. Instead they are mostly moved into the only things analytics care about: logic and ethics. The former because they are always temporarily embarrassed mathematicians and the latter because teaching students the sophistry needed to morally justify building bombs for Raytheon that kill thousands of poor people is the bread and butter that keeps American philosophy departments funded. About metaphysics, ontology, etc., they care not at all. Those fields tend to try their best at ambitious answers to unanswerable questions whereas the analytics strive for unusable answers to banal questions.

td;dr: I think you give Anglo philosophy students FAR too much credit. In my experience they aren't well read at all and their departments are staffed by professors who aren't well read.