<p>Caltech shares some art and music programs with Occidental College and the Art Center College of Design, but I don’t know many people who take humanities classes at other places. While none of Caltech’s humanities are very prestigious, it does have a reasonably large course offering considering the number of students. Everyone has to take on average one humanity or social science class a term to graduate (on top of ~4 math/science/engineering classes a term.) A lot of people opt to have a humanity or SS major in addition of their “technical” one, but if you’re not pretty certain you want to major in math, science, or engineering as your primary field, Stanford is way better.</p>
<p>I personally was very interested in history, philosophy, and political science in high school, and I’ve gotten to take interesting classes in all of the those fields at Caltech. For most students’ purposes, the humanities and SS course offerings are fine and are generally well-taught. If you’re really interested in a particular obscure humanities subfield, though, unless it just happens to be the field of interest of a tenured professor here, Stanford is going to be better for you academically.</p>
<p>You can check out Caltech’s course offerings [url=<a href=“http://pr.caltech.edu/catalog/courses/courses.html]here[/url”>Office of Communications and External Relations]here[/url</a>]. Some of the more specialized courses change from year to year. In particular, notice that we have a lot of history and philosphy of science classes or other humanities courses that are related to science. It’s not hard to find at least several courses a term that seem really cool to you. As for other technical fields, Caltech has a pretty large variety of course offerings in, say, subfields of geology or other things that you may have not tried out.</p>
<p>I’d recommend you pick between Stanford and Caltech based on fit. Generally, only a pretty specific type of person really “clicks” with the Caltech student culture, and so if you haven’t felt that at all (hopefully you came to prefrosh weekend), you’ll almost certainly be happier at Stanford.</p>