Well, Maryland did when I was there (though a quick google tells me they don’t anymore). Some of the public universities in California have their upper-division requirements structured such that even when it’s possible to get through without upper-division science or math courses, it’s not easy. It’s hard to tell for sure from the websites of the colleges my daughter’s looking at, but a number of the liberal-arts colleges seem to have such requirements, though they don’t always have complete lists of which courses fulfill which distribution requirements and they don’t always number courses in a way that makes their levels obvious anyway.
Interestingly, I also poked around and found only a very few few colleges that actually require upper-division humanities courses of STEM majors. Even at the one I teach at, where I’d thought there was such a requirement, it turns out that it’s only for selected majors (e.g., biology, math) but not for all (it’s not required for, e.g., engineering or health sciences majors).
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.
@GMTplus7: Wish I could triple thumbs-up you re: plumbers. What’s more is that there’s a ton of 'em out there with aching backs, yearning for a “legacy hire” that they can groom to take over the business, leaving the original owner with the ability to supplement retirement income with some passive residuals.