Is your kid a winner or loser in the coming new world order of jobs?

Well, like I said, it’s hard to tell. (Whatever happened to simple PDFs of catalogs you could just page through?) But as I recall from quickly googling earlier, I found schools that had lists of classes that made it possible to get through without an upper-division STEM course, but not easy.

But it occurred to me as I was about to fire up the search engine to find these again: We’re on the verge of getting into an argument based on proof by anecdote. I’m pretty sure that even someone who only ever took an introductory stats class would recognize that an argument based on “Hey here’s three schools that do uncommon thing X” going up against “But here’s three other schools that do uncommon thing Y” is a silly argument.

I think the main takeaway is that it’s incredibly unusual for humanities majors to be required to take upper-division STEM courses, and it’s incredibly unusual for STEM majors to be required to take upper-division humanities courses—and, I would claim, that’s completely okay. The purpose of a college education is to develop a breadth of knowledge, yes, but also then to begin to specialize within that. Really, I’d like my chemists and philosophers to all have some basic exposure to the basics of reasoning in science and the humanities, but I’d also like my chemists to specialize in chemistry and my philosophers to specialize in philosophy. Developing even the beginnings of expertise requires making a choice to focus on one thing and not another.