I understood that Ivy and D3 athletes were more likely to quit after admission than Division I where they receive athletic scholarships. For some reason the author is still on the Stanford roster. She also competed in the August 3019 Absolute Fencing Invitational in Singapore. There’s definitely some risk that recruitied athletes quit, get injured or transfer for more playing time.
These are non-revenue sports that were cut. They surely have well heeled alumni, to deal with in addition to current athletes, their parents and impacted coaches and staff. Ultimately they were funding 36 sports at a high level.
Well, one can always go back and look at what makes it into each periodical. Of course, that’s hardly objective “data” because editors make the decision on what to publish. So it may be reflective of overall attitudes on campus, or it may not. Probably best just to read the piece and weigh the arguments pro and con based on what you already know and can additionally learn as well as any evidence that the piece provides (often requiring a judgement or interpretation of that evidence). The scientific method is useful when applicable. This might not be one of those times.
I wasn’t impressed with the Stanford Review article. It came off as an unhappy rant that someone unsuccessfully tried to pass off as intellectual.
The following fairly respectable ranking has Stanford’s arts and humanities program as the best in the world.
I used to work at Stanford and would take classes there for interest. I’m a STEM guy, but my impression is that Stanford’s humanities offerings are outstanding. Among the best classes I’ve ever taken were a couple of Stanford classes on old Japanese literature. But it’s not the kind of university you necessarily go to if you want a liberal arts education. People go there to get STEM degrees, start companies, and get rich. If you’re looking for a liberal arts college ethos, go to a liberal arts college. Or Yale. Or Chicago.
This makes a huge amount of sense.
I think this is evidence of Stanford’s changing ethos. Here is what Leland Stanford himself wrote about the university, once upon a time:
“I attach great importance to general literature for the enlargement of the mind and for giving business capacity. I think I have noticed that technically educated boys do not make the most successful businessmen. The imagination needs to be cultivated and developed to assure success in life. A man will never construct anything he cannot conceive.” (A Case for Liberal Education - Stanford Bulletin)
Stanford’s undergraduate website also professes to provide a liberal education:
" Degree Requirements
The aims of an undergraduate education are for students to own knowledge, hone capacities, develop personal and social responsibility, and learn to adapt knowledge and skills developed in one setting to new challenges and circumstances. To achieve these aims, Stanford provides the means for you to acquire a liberal education that encompasses breadth requirements, major requirements, and electives. Through all these aspects of your education, you will gain breadth and depth of knowledge and skills, as well as the ability to flourish as an engaged, responsible citizen."
Maybe it’s less about what the university itself provides and more about the type of undergraduate they are bringing to campus? Stanford has excellent non-STEM graduate programs, including Humanities, as this poster has pointed out. But - also pointed out - there is clearly a dichotomy between available resources and interest level among the undergrads.
Distribution of majors in a recent class’ bachelor’s degrees, listing humanities groupings and other popular majors or major groupings at each school:
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=stanford&s=all&id=243744
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=chicago&s=all&pg=3&id=144050#programs
Stanford Chicago
English 49 62
Foreign Lang / Lit 46 59
History 32 52
Philosophy / Religious 25 63
Visual / Performing Art 44 43
Total humanities / arts 196 279
Economics 86 334
Computer Science 327 82
Engineering 326 22
Math / Statistics 87 121
Multidisciplinary 270 1
Biology 72 137
All majors 1818 1520The popular majors at each school do likely have substantial numbers of students choosing them with some consideration of pre-professional preparation.
It’s expected that the bulk of high achieving students will choose fields that are associated with greater financial stability and higher salaries, which is generally not humanities. At highly selective privates, a common such path has traditionally been economics → finance. A significant portion of Chicago students seem to follow this model. Economics has also traditionally been the most common major at Ivies. In the past, the 2nd most common path at highly selective private colleges was usually bio → medicine (I realize that you do not have to major in bio for pre-med, but it is by far the most common major choice among pre-meds). However, in recent years there has been an huge increase in interest in the relatively new CS → SW engineer path, which is clearly the most common path at Stanford. CS has also been rising in popularity at several Ivies and has overtaken economics as the most popular major at a few. For example:
2008 at Harvard – 742 economics concentrators, 408 bio related, 94 computer science
2019 at Harvard – 612 economics concentrators, 555 computer science, 518 bio related
This doesn’t mean that students pursuing a more financially pragmatic career in CS, finance, or medicine are not interested in humanities or classics. The author of the linked article mentions some of Stanford classics paths are intended for double majors. I expect she is referring to Stanford’s CS + X program, which was intended to allow students who are passionate about classics or other humanities to simultaneously pursue their passion in humanities while also getting a more financially pragmatic CS degree. Stanford had specially tracks designed to integrate CS and the humanities major in unique ways that would not occur with a more traditional double major. One of the 14 available CS+humanities options was CS+Classics, so Classics is expected to have a special CS integration track.
I use past tense because the program was discontinued last year after 6 year pilot trial. It’s my understanding that students found it challenging to complete the combination of requirements for both fields within 4 years, which limited their opportunities for things like studying abroad. Instead students seemed to favor things like doing a minor in a humanities field or just taking a lot of self-selected electives in whatever humanities classes/fields interest them, without getting a major/minor in the humanities field. If they plan on having a career CS, then getting a piece of paper that lists the humanities major/minor probably isn’t critical.
I don’t see this pattern changing much at highly selective private colleges with open major enrollment. If a particular major is associated with a much higher salary than other options, then that major is likely to be popular with a good portion of high achieving students. And if a particular major is associated with a much lower salary than other options, then that major is likely to be unpopular with the bulk of high achieving students.
Specific numbers from CollegeScorecard about early career earnings and major enrollment at the discussed colleges are below. Note that sample size is often small and sample is biased, so numbers are not precise, and only majors with meaningful sample size are included. Nevertheless, there is a clear pattern.
Highest earning majors at Chicago: CS $91k, Economics $86k, and Math $72k
Most popular majors at Chicago: Economics, Math, and Biology
Highest earning majors at Stanford: CS $136k, Math $97k, and Engineering $93k
Most popular majors at Stanford: CS, Human Biology, and Engineering
There are also options at Stanford, such as the previously mentioned SLE, which is intended to provide a LAC like experience within a research university. This experience includes providing a smaller college feel by having SLE dorms in which all residents in the dorm take the same SLE coursework, which is partially integrated in to residential life. The website description and an example SLE reading list that a user posted to the CC forum is below.
One difference that seems to be a theme of these comparisons is Stanford makes SLE and similar optional rather than required. Students who want the LAC like experience can do SLE. Students who do not want this experience can choose a different dorm.
SLE Website Description
Sometimes called ‘a liberal arts college experience’ within the University, Structured Liberal Education (SLE) is a residence-based academic program that encourages students to live a life of ideas in an atmosphere that emphasizes critical thinking and interpretation.
Focusing on great works of philosophy, religion, literature, painting, and film drawn largely, but not exclusively, from the Western tradition, the SLE curriculum places particular emphasis on artists and intellectuals who brought new ways of thinking and new ways of creating into the world, often overthrowing prior traditions in the process. These are the works that redefined beauty, challenged the authority of conventional wisdom, raised questions of continuing importance to us today, and—for good or ill—created the world we still live in.
,
Example SLE Text List
fall quarter reading: the odyssey, aristotle - the politics, euripides - the bacchae, sophocles - antigone, plato - the last days of socrates, aristotle - nicomachean ethics, aeschylus - the oresteia, plato - the republic thucydides - history of the peloponnesian war, the bible, sappho, plato’s symposium
winter quarter reading: cervantes - don quixote, balzac - pere goriot, shakespeare - king lear, machiavelli - the prince and discourses, st. augustine - confessions, the marx-engels reader, descartes - meditations on first philosophy, chuang tzu - the essential, dante - inferno, listening to the magic flute and reading its libretto.
spring quarter reading: marx, dickens - hard times, nietzsche - gay science, genealogy of morals, ibsen - enemy of the people, chekhov - cherry orchard, ts eliot - the waste land, woolf - to the lighthouse, freud, koestler - darkness at noon, kafka - metamorphosis, arendt - eichmann in jerusalem, camus - the plague, sartre - existentialism as a humanism, salih - season of migration to the north
Agree. It is about allowing your students to choose. Not only is there SLE, but Stanford has many overseas campuses, a campus in NYC and DC. If you pin down your undergrads with many core requirements the price you pay is that they are unable to do other things that they would find valuable for themselves. Allowing diversity in educational choice rather than mandating a certain canon that shapes your students the way you like.
Really hard and challenging courses intended as the introduction to the humanities and the social sciences may very well be gateways to further courses in those areas as well as to majors and even to academic careers specifically focused on those subjects. However, at a school like Chicago that is not the principal reason they exist. As many have pointed out, even at Chicago only a minority of students - a minority getting always smaller - take those directions.
The real benefit and value of a Chicago education is that it introduces youngsters of every future profession to the important ideas and modes of argument and artistic creation that have shaped our civilization. From a foundation of that kind they can go in many different directions, including further scholarship, but also simply into a life of intelligent reading and rereading of the great writers, of informed thinking about the world, of encounter of great art and literature. The scholarly path does permit greater exposure and discipline to be brought to bear on these subject matters, but in some ways it also narrows and even dilutes the impact of them. The greatest stuff is too important to be left to specialists. They are necessary, but to what end? - I would say it is to purvey these important subject matters into the lives of merely intelligent kids and make of them considering and pondering lay thinkers and citizens. The life of the mind knows no bounds.
I have some personal experience of both paths. I majored in English, even took an M.A. in it, and then taught briefly at several colleges, but ultimately I left the scholarly life behind. Looking back on all that I find much to value in that part, but it is really the undiluted direct encounter with the great thinkers and writers in these foundation courses that most affected me.
The principal effect and value of an education is not to make young professors but to light fires in the hearts and minds of youngsters that will burn long after school is done and make of them sentient human beings and citizens. I believe something like this aspiration fires the kids who come to Chicago seeking that ethos both in the Core itself and in their fellow students. Most of them are slated to become future professionals in the worlds of business, medicine, and law, but there is also a time to start figuring out the meaning of things. As Plato knew, that aspiration is powerful and seductive.
What’s the reason for the existence of this thread? Is it to lament the loss of “ethos” at Stanford, or to boast those of UChicago? They’re very different schools with different cultures and different curricula. One is more freewheeling and the other more rigid. Some students may prefer one to the other. Here’s a suggestion to those who believe UChicago is a better choice. Get rid of ED1/ED2. Give these students the option to choose.
Stanford’s Faculty Senate has adopted two proposals to de-emphasize wealth in admissions. It’s an interesting read, and no doubt Stanford would benefit from greater representation of students from families with lower incomes, even though Stanford does have above average POC enrollment (including Asians).
"The first proposal is designed to reduce the influence of wealth in undergraduate admission and to increase the socioeconomic diversity of the undergraduate class. It urges university leaders “to devote resources to improving data collection by modifying Stanford’s application to require applicants to list those who advised or read their application, and to describe their relationship with those people.” "
“In addition, the Faculty Senate called for “improved communication that will enhance Stanford’s efforts to publicly describe and demystify the admission process and to reduce disparities among those who can or cannot afford, for instance, private counseling.””
I would be interested to know what proportion of the low income students admitted to Stanford DID have professional counseling assistance on their apps. There are thousands of CBOs providing pro-bono counseling services to low SES students…some of the larger organizations are ScholarMatch, Avid, and CollegePoint.
These programs are typically competitive admission, and can only function with the generosity of independent counselors who take on one or more pro-bono clients each year. https://casp.nacacnet.org/
Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
" College Confidential is not a debating society."
https://www.collegeconfidential.com/policies/rules
Ad hominems have no place on this, or any, thread.
State your point, defend once if necessary, and then move on from the dead horse. For some reason, any thread questioning an aspect of UChicago is second only to the USNWR ranking threads for drawing out the same users debating the same points to death.
I think these numbers that UCB posted demonstrate that, all else equal, UChicago students still prefer the humanities (incl. history) relative to Stanford students. This finding is consistent with @simba9’s narrative above. By the way, law school is one professional option that attracts humanities majors. Stanford has relatively fewer students applying to law school than does UChicago.
Yes, that’s been the trend (and, by the way, law school does attract humanities majors, as I mentioned above). In terms of relative concentrations, UChicago still attracts relatively more humanities kids. That might be due to the strong “liberal arts” identity of the College (even the engineering major is offered within that context) or - not unrelated - it could be that the heavy dose of non-STEM reading and writing requirements tend to attract those more specialized in those areas.
Actually, according to the Winter '21 census report, of declared majors the most popular are Econ (by a long shot), then Bio and C/S (essentially tied) and then Math in fourth place.
What needs to be pointed out is that, at least as far as UChicago is concerned, Admissions is sculpting the class to reflect more diverse major interests than what you see at Stanford. So while student interests and goals will be reflected in major choices, it’s also the case that admissions officers are managing the distribution.
True (18% at Chicago versus 11% at Stanford), although all of the humanities and arts majors combined at Chicago are outnumbered by economics (commonly a Wall Street prep major).
However, both universities do have a greater percentage of humanities and arts majors than colleges overall, which have under 6% humanities and arts majors among bachelor’s degree completions, according to the numbers from the following:
(the following breaks out history from “social sciences and history”)
Actually, this is probably one of those “let 1000 flowers bloom” issues. There are students who really enjoy those Core requirements and chose UChicago specifically for the opportunity to engage with their classmates in a broad range of disciplines, including the smaller-sized and intense formats for Hum, Sosc, Civ and Math.
In contrast, we know several bright kids who wouldn’t apply to UChicago precisely because they preferred more choice and less “Core.” They got into, and attended, elsewhere.
This sort of difference emphasizes how universities may be distinct from one another. The smart applicant will figure this out and apply first choice to the program that matches his/her own understanding of what an undergraduate education should be. There is not a single “correct” answer here; a lot will depend on the purpose and goals of the institution itself. Know what those are, and you will have a better understanding of their undergraduate program.
This sounds like a distinction between the “privileged poor” (i.e. those who come from poor families, but found their way into situations encouraging academic achievement and keeping them on the track for preparing for and applying to more selective colleges) versus others (who may be attending under-resourced high schools where overburdened counselors are too busy dealing with other problems to help with college prep beyond the local community college, and there are few other students or other people in their lives who can help them with college preparation and application beyond the local community college).
One of the main talking points of the College is that there is no contradiction between a liberal education and professional success across a broad range of opportunities. Depending on what you want to do, you might need to begin your planning in first year; for example, Pre-Med is a four-year track at UChicago both in terms of curriculum and extra-curricular activities. By the way, @Data10, since you mentioned it upthread, at UChicago biology is NOT by far the most common major for pre-med. According to the pre-med advising office, it’s actually just over 50%, with the remainder in a “plethora” of other majors, and acceptance rates to medical school really aren’t impacted by your choice of major. Most pre-meds who major in bio do so because they like the subject. That’s also true for pre-meds who major in something else (history, economics, English, etc.).