Your intended major affects your application and Harvard is concerned about yield too

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/harvard-admissions-affirmative-action.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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I think we all knew intended major had some impact, but I was also surprised to read it stated so explicitly:

Harvard doesn’t want to become a tech school.

Of course an institution has many needs it wants to balance. With the hoopla of accusations, we’ve missed this justifiable reality, what makes Harvard what it is. They have faculty to keep busy in multiple fields and, at the same time, a limit to how many of one sort (major) the system can tolerate. And they want diversity in interests, types, goals, energies.

Queue a whole lot of kids ‘thinking about a German major’ but changing to CS once they get in in 3, 2, 1 


How do you identify humanists among the applicants? By that measure, Harvard’s admissions failed. Many of Harvard’s graduates went to Wall Street instead.

Harvard’s biggest undergraduate major is economics at 219 graduates in a recent class, according to https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=harvard&id=166027#programs . Probably not surprising, given its Wall Street feeder status. CS at 131 and all kinds of engineering combined at 78 are smaller majors (apparently relatively few of the 700+ students in CS 50 become CS majors).

Economics also appears to be a capacity-limited major, since it requires at least a B- in each intermediate economics course, according to https://economics.harvard.edu/concentration-requirements .

While it does not appear that CS is a capacity-limited major at Harvard, they certainly could put limits and minimum grades and GPA to enter the major, like with economics, if the demand starts to exceed the department’s capacity.

An English major can go to work on Wall Street and that doesn’t mean that they’re not a humanist, just like if a chem major goes to work on Wall Street it doesn’t follow that they’re not a real scientist.

What I think Fitz meant is that they don’t have enough English, or comparative literature, Classics, etc., majors anymore, because this generation skews toward STEM. Harvard has big humanities departments with many star faculty and not enough students.

And you won’t get in on a major you don’t have the right experiences in.

Who the heck wants to pay a Harvard price for a humanities degree?

“Queue a whole lot of kids ‘thinking about a German major’ but changing to CS once they get in in 3, 2, 1 
”

d’oh
 make that ‘cue’


A non-trivial percentage of Harvard students do. Perhaps because Harvard is a recruiting target for elitist employers that pay well, students there may feel that they have more freedom to study the humanities and still have many options in job and career prospects at graduation, unlike at other colleges where students are more likely to feel that they need to choose a major for its major-specific job prospects.

The number of computer science concentrators at Harvard has quadrupled in the past 7 years. If the rate of increase continues, CS will overtake economics to become Harvard’s most popular concentration in 2019. If Harvard is trying to keep the number of CS concentrations in some kind of balance, they don’t appear to be doing a good job of it. The lawsuit analysis found little correlation between planned concentration and admission decision among similarly rated applicants, giving no indication that CS planned concentrations are held to higher standards than other planned concentrations.

I’d expect very few students to receive grades below B-. The few C students can still pursue the concentration. They just need to take another economics course to show that they are adequately knowledgeable. One of the options is taking 975a , which is an economics tutorial whose enrollment is limited to concentrators who received below a B- in Economics 1010a or 1011a. The handbook states, “Students who receive below a B- in 1010a/1011a must either register for 975a or take an extra economics elective with 1010a/1011a as a prerequisite.”

A bunch of future lawyers, doctors, bankers, entrepreneurs, professors, politicians, CEOs
for starters.

Is a chem major who upon graduation goes to work on Wall Street a real scientist? No.

Could the chem major become a scientist in the future? Perhaps.

Is that likely? No


My point is that the English major is just as much a humanist as the STEM major is a scientist. An upper-level English major can be a teaching assistant in an introductory poetry class just like an upper level chem major can be a teaching assistant in introductory organic chemistry. If they want the specialized knowledge and skills to be professors/researchers in their disciplines, they’ll have to get advanced degrees.

Being a humanities major or a STEM major teaches you one or another way of thinking and enables you to lead a better life, as an educated person, which is an end in itself. That said, an undergraduate degree in each type of major equips you with certain concrete skills (and, frankly, being able to write well in a number of contexts can be a lot more useful in everyday life than the fundamentals of chemistry, but that’s beside the point). The distributional requirements at a place like Harvard also ensure that a student gets exposure to some other disciplines and modes of thought. Graduating from Harvard, whatever your major, is generally going to give you the tools to succeed in a variety of professions, as @OHMomof2 points out.

As for “who the heck wants to pay a Harvard price for a humanities degree”, where do I start? People who have a passion or talent for the humanities, if they’re fortunate enough to be admitted to Harvard, will be able to study with some of the greatest professors in those fields and enjoy all the resources of Harvard (including the lifetime benefit of being in its network, which can be considerable). They’ll be exposed to a remarkable group of students and have an experience with few parallels. If they have financial need, the amount of aid available means attendance is probably cheaper than at their state flagship.

If you think of college as just a ticket to be punched on the way to getting a job, in my opinion you miss out on a lot and, to some extent, Harvard is wasted on you. Attending and graduating from Harvard will, however, position you very well for many jobs, no matter what you study there.

@elodyCOH I guess we are willing to pay for a humanities degree. But D22 hasn’t completely ruled out majoring in astrophysics either.

Can anyone with just an undergrad degree can be called a “real scientist”?

Chem majors may understand companies that deal in chemicals, chem concepts, whatever. They’d be in a position to understand those markets, what the companies do, etc.

A few examples (math, physics, biochem, chem eng all doing Wall St but also using the science degree): https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2005/03/02/science-majors-trade-the-lab-for-wall-street/

Of course finance is full of philosophy, English, History etc majors as well.

Fitzsimmons’ testimony on the stand implies that an engineer or a scientist is less of a humanist. This is shockingly condescending. It’s also revealing and perhaps explains why Asian American applicants, a majority of whom apply to be STEM majors, were given lower “personal quality” ratings, and ultimately discriminated against.

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TBH, I don’t really understand the term “humanist” in the context he used it. “Humanities major”? Sure.

Curious about stats on that. Is it actually true that Asian Americans apply to STEM majors more than white or black or Hispanic students? ALL STEM majors?

I know that is the conventional wisdom/stereotype here on CC, but is it factually accurate?

@OHMomof2

According to Wikipedia,

Here’re some old data on choice of majors broken down by race. I believe the tilt toward STEM majors among Asian American applicants is even more pronounced in recent years. https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-tables/students-stem-fields-gender-and-race-ethnicity. The data are not Harvard-specific, of course, but perhaps the Harvard data will be revealed in the trial too.