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<p>The best and the brightest who are interested in engineering and the hard sciences flock to engineering and the hard sciences. The best and the brightest who are interested in history / political science / art / philosophy / French / whatever flock to those disciplines.
Amazingly, people flock to what interests them. Go figure!</p>
<p>You’re welcome!</p>
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<p>Or because they live in DC and have an elderly relative they want to be close to.
Or because they had a full ride to AU and not to Princeton.
Or because AU offered some opportunity Princeton did not.
Or because they liked the hustle and bustle of a big city better than a small area
Or because they have a particular interest that AU offers and Princeton doesn’t.
Plenty of reasons. How unsophisticated of you to think otherwise. Life isn’t the USNWR rankings, well, unless you’re 18 years old.</p>
<p>The best and brightest are the USAMO/IMO kids who go to MIT/Harvard/Princeton and get a PhD in math and pursue the Fields Medal sometime in their lives.</p>
<p>Besides that, there is no general track that the “brighter” math/science kids follow.</p>
<p>It seems many see the best and the brightest as being where they have had exposure. My MIT PhD candidate, brilliant where math is concerned, is no brighter than my 2 liberal arts focused children. He has more ability and knowledge in some areas certainly, but so do my other two.</p>
<p>Human mind thinks like pink noise while the reality is brown noise. When human acts, the reality looks like white noise.</p>
<p>hmom, do you want to ask your children what it means?</p>
<p>"The best and the brightest who are interested in engineering and the hard sciences flock to engineering and the hard sciences. The best and the brightest who are interested in history / political science / art / philosophy / French / whatever flock to those disciplines.
Amazingly, people flock to what interests them. Go figure!</p>
<p>You’re welcome!"</p>
<p>+1</p>
<p>Plus, what interests them is often not totally unrelated to what they are best at. While it maybe true that not every English major would thrive in a top engineering program, it can equally be said that many engineers of my acquaintance would do rather poorly as English majors.</p>
<p>I don’t really find one group’s set of capabilities and interests to be inherently “superior” to another group’s set of capabilities and interests.</p>
<p>They may be somewhat different though.</p>
<p>“Generalization”</p>
<p>“Angry Rebuttal”</p>
<p>“Hey, why is Rice so underrated!”</p>
<p>Silly thread. Are math, science, and engineering inherently “harder” than humanities and social sciences? I don’t think so. There are far more top SAT M scorers than top SAT CR scorers, and far more top scorers in SAT II math and science subject tests than in the humanities. Most math/science geeks would not do well in a humanities/social science curriculum (even if they do OK at the baby level), just as most humanities/social sciences freaks would not do well in a math/science curriculum (even if they do OK at the baby level). Different interests, different skill sets. There are exceptions, of course. A small subset of the ultra-talented do well at both. Some social sciences are basically quantitative (e.g., parts of econ, quantitative poli sci) and/or analytic in a math-ish sort of way (I’m thinking here of, e.g., philosophical logic), and at the highest levels math is almost a humanities discipline, more akin to music and philosophy than to the (comparatively) pedestrian “applied math” fields like econ, engineering, and the natural sciences. But of course the latter have their own virtues.</p>
<p>The point is, there are many ways to achieve your full academic potential, whatever it is—and yours will differ from someone else’s. And there are b.s. ways of doing math, science, and engineering, just as there are b.s. ways of doing literature, philosophy, social sciences, and the arts. But don’t write off an entire field of intellectual inquiry just because you’ve seen someone b.s. their way through it, or because you’ve done it yourself. To do so only reflects your own limitations.</p>
<p>Interests tend to follow abilities. In my experience, math skills are a scarcer commodity than verbal skills. Most of the top math students I knew had excellent verbal skills but not vice-versa. I am always more impressed by a graduate from a math-intensive major.</p>
<p>WHOA, WHOA, WHOA! It’s sad that I am not sure if this is a joke. Is it? Had you EVER clicked on a competetive asian’s (which I am part–and will proudly generalize) college search post, you would know that not everyone is interested in what they major in! Engineering, comp sci, the works! </p>
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<li>Parents have major roles in many students lives and pressure them into difficult areas that they believe will secure them a job. 2. Not every student is “interested” in any major. I have a niece soon to graduate with a BS in finance and has absolutely no interest in it. What an incredibly difficult concept to grasp!</li>
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<p>^ps, this is directed at Pizzagirl</p>
<p>some CCers are so dramatic</p>
<p>Actually most employers only look for a degree and accomplishments, not where or what you got it in (unless your major was very related which is rarer than you’d think…).</p>
<p>Pizzagirl’s response #21 wins my vote for the best answer to your silly post.</p>
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<p>Not to take anything away from your experience, but the statistics simply don’t bear this out. According to the College Board, there are almost twice as many 750+ SAT M scorers as there are SAT 750+ CR scorers annually. In SAT Subject tests, there are roughly 5 times as many students scoring 750+ in Math II as the number scoring 750+ in Literature. The truly rare scores on the SAT are 750+ scores in SAT I CR and SAT II Literature. Top math scores are, comparatively, a dime a dozen.</p>
<p>“Scarcity,” however, may mean many things. It could be relative to demand. There may indeed be greater societal (and consequently economic) demand for the math-proficient. But I don’t think the top colleges and universities are so concerned about those sorts of societal and economic pressures. They have their own ancient and well-rehearsed institutional logic, built around expansion of human knowledge. They’re looking for those who can contribute to that project. What they find is that far more can contribute math skills than can contribute the skills of the humanities. So when it comes to “scarcity” at the level of college and university level, I think the advantage may lie with the verbally gifted who are scarcer in number. </p>
<p>I think a frequent mistake made by math/science folks is to conflate basic verbal competence with high-level verbal proficiency. Most of us are verbally competent, just as most of us are basically numerate. That doesn’t mean we’re gifted in those respective domains. Far more of us are gifted in math than in language. Statistically speaking, I think that’s incontrovertible.</p>
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<p>Engineering is not a trade. Plumbing is a trade.</p>
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<p>I’m confused. Aren’t the SATs curved?</p>
<p>^ They are, but the math section is so ridiculously rudimentary that even the harshest curve reasonable still causes that many 750+ scorers.</p>
<p>IMO the right way of making high math scores more scarce is to increase the difficulty of the section, not to incorporate a ridiculous curve.</p>
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<p>Then it would skew the curve and shift the mean. Anyway, it is a relative measure. I would look at the AMC or AIME scores. I know a lot of kids aced SAT math (>750+) when they were in 8th grade.</p>
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<p>They are both trades:</p>
<p>[define:trade</a> - Google Search](<a href=“define:trade - Google Search”>define:trade - Google Search)</p>
<p>But funny you should mention this. My DS had a conversation with a plumbing contractor working on a home we built. He asked DS what he was studying and proceeded to tell him the average plumber makes more than the average engineer. I didn’t research the subject, but who knows?</p>
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Not if they adjusted the curve as well. They have the control to normalize scores; they just haven’t done so.</p>