Are some majors harder than others?

Thomas_1
Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:19:48 +0000

Actually, no, I never said that all people switching out of a difficult major would be concentrated in few safety majors. Obviously plenty of people switch majors out of intellectual interest.

What I am saying is that on a net basis, people will tend to switch from more difficult majors to the safety majors. In other words, I don’t disagree that some people will switch from a safety major to, say, engineering out of intellectual interest, and vice versa. But in addition to that, there will also be people who switch from engineering to the safety major because the engineering is simply too difficult, but practically never does the opposite occur. In other words, subtracting out all those who switch majors because of intellectual interest still leaves you with a net residual value - and that residual comprises the safety major metric.

I actually implied that, I was meaning to say “people who switch out of a major due to difficulty”, not “all people who switch out of a major”. Still, even for those people I would argue that they choose the new major mainly based on interest, while keeping difficulty in mind (i.e. choosing the correct tier). They don’t say “hey, what’s the easiest major I could finish that I may have some interest in”, but rather “Hm, what am I interested in? X! Is X hard? If yes, what else is there? …”



Oh, I don’t care whether you want to ‘coarsen’ the levels of measurement by discretizing them. If the metric of the safety major is measured from 1-10 and you want to say that anything with the score of 8-10 should all be binned within the “high” category, that’s fine by me.

Good, because that’s the main point on which I disagree with you. I think there are something like 3-4 tiers within which it really doesn’t make much sense to switch majors (due to difficulty), because the difficulties are rather similar (and depending on the actual classes). By that logic people wouldn’t switch more than 2-3 times due to difficulty, which I think makes sense.