<p>I've always been baffled why people are more interested where you went to college instead of what you studied. </p>
<p>To me, completing a degree in a hard subject like engineering or math at a 2nd tier uni is much more impressive than in the liberal arts or business at a 1st tier place.</p>
<p>Indeed, the very highest ranked universities produce mostly liberal arts and biology grads - but very few in engineering or computer science.</p>
<p>There are so many dopey majors available today as well - "area" studies, business, communications sciences, etc.</p>
<p>You are making some very broad generalizations about things that are very reliant on context. Where a person attended school and what they specifically studied can be more or less important under various circumstances. </p>
<p>I also don’t believe the vast majority of people in our society believe that studying disciplines other than math or science are “dopey” pursuits.</p>
<p>What the best and brighest students study is very much a reflection on what a society values. In the United States of America, anyone with math and science aptitude is incented to become a medical practicioner since the pay for MDs, particularly specialists is over three times what an engineer or scientist makes before his job is eventually out sourced to India or China, or denuded of its defined benefit pension . Our brightest students know the score and therefore stay away from computer science and engineering.</p>
<p>Oh, probably for the same reasons many people wonder why anyone would study engineering or math given that the vast majority of those subjects can be performed in a few nanoseconds by a piece of silicon the size of a mouse’s pinky.</p>
<p>Don’t knock ridiculous generalizations! They’re just like Cheetos, you might look like an idiot after a few but they still taste good for a little while.</p>
<p>I was under the impression that majoring in engineering and math made one’s skill sets much less prone to being outsourced or relegated to a machine. Those types of occupations tended to be more of the IT/Business variety. </p>
<p>Also, don’t the best and the brightest flock to engineering and the hard sciences anyway? These fields tend to offer more job security and higher starting salaries than whatever job opportunities are available to humanities majors.</p>
<p>It might be the case that graduating from a top notch college signals that you have the talent to pursue whatever you want-it’s just that you chose say english because it was the most interesting subject to you.</p>
<p>I don’t know if this is true, but an average student at HYP, including the english majors at these schools, may have higher math test scores and grades than math majors at a second tier school.</p>
<p>There were a lot of people I went to college with who thought this way. People from our engineering school were constantly telling students in our business school and in arts and science how easy our lives were. Maybe they were right, but the engineers make a fraction today of what the business majors do, and many who studied history, so I guess they were right about our lives being easier in some respects.</p>
<p>In engineering you’re taught a trade. In the liberal arts you’re taught to think. Which is more valuable is in the eye of the beholder.</p>
<p>The only way to speak about broad topics is generalizations. There are always exceptions and nuances one can make, depending on where one sets the visibility scope of the discussion, but to criticize generalizations per se doesn’t follow.</p>
<p>Engineering teaches applied science, it teaches one how to think critically about a wide class of problems. And you cannot BS your way through it with fancy rhetoric.</p>
<p>This thread makes me continually facepalm. As an engineering major, we’re definitely not taught “a trade”. In fact, one of the major complaints in our engineering department (for EECS atleast) is that we’re not being practical enough. The courses tend to focus much more on theory and the basis of topics rather than the applications. The whole point of going to college to study engineering is so that you could apply your skills for technology that’s not even developed yet. I don’t go to school to learn about C/C++, I go to school to learn about the theory behind it. Most employers don’t expect you to know everything off the bat. That’s why they look for the brightest employees, the ones who are the most driven to learn their in-house rules and techniques.</p>
<p>I suspect that people concentrate more on the name instead of the major because of the perceived “intelligence” of the graduates of bigger names. It doesn’t really matter what you majored in; what’s more important is that you had the drive and talent to go to such a college to being with. I think most people would agree that majoring in something other than the hard sciences (the “dopey” majors as you would refer to it) doesn’t mean that it’s less impressive. It just means that was more interesting than say, chemistry. People without these “hard science degrees” are able to succeed because they have the ambition, the managerial skills and the cleverness to succeed. I’d say this is fairly independent of one’s major.</p>
Precisely. I majored in Classics at a top private university. Without meaning to boast, I’m pretty sure I am more intelligent than most of my former classmates who went on to study science and engineering at NC State. </p>
<p>Am I somehow less intelligent simply because I chose to study a different subject? I certainly could have handled it (I picked up a chem minor), but it simply wasn’t that interesting to me.</p>
<p>In any case, you are heading down a slippery slope. Would you really care to rank all the hundreds of majors in difficulty? Would you care to factor in college difficulty (i.e. engineering at Caltech vs. engineering at Purdue)? It seems a rather tall order to me. :eek:</p>
<p>. . . Because the college name reflects intelligence while college major reflects interest</p>
<p>Why would someone pick American University over Princeton University?
Because he/she was not intelligent enough to get into Princeton.</p>
<p>Why would someone pick Peace Studies over Biology/Chemistry?
Because Peace Studies is a more interesting major to him/her.</p>
<p>So (to generalize), a student at Princeton is different from one at American because he/she is more intelligent. A student in Biology is different from one in Peace Studies merely because he/she liked Biology more.</p>
<p>While I’ve certainly seen this at large state schools, this was not the case at Penn where I went to college. Whartonites busted their butts too and few flunked out of either school.</p>
<p>But really, why does the rigor of those 4 years matter? I don’t think the engineers are any happier, feel any more intellectually satisfied and as I noted above, they certainly are not better compensated.</p>
<p>My DS is a grad student at MIT. He loves the challenges of engineering but he has looked around enough and had enough internships to know he doesn’t want a typical engineering job. He’s enjoying the education though</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen, lots of kids choose engineering because of the high starting salaries. After the dotcom bust, the number of engineering majors dropped dramatically everywhere. The irony is that I don’t think most realize how quickly most engineers top out salary wise.</p>
<p>I think my kids should have some fun in college, I sure did. My engineering child enjoyed college less than my other two and doesn’t even want to be an engineer. Go figure! He also didn’t form the number of friendships and the networks that my other 2 are forming in liberal arts environments. At his engineering heavy college everyone was in their rooms studying with closed doors.</p>