I’m not talking about “B students”, but about A students who have Bs in English. We don’t get “B students” asking about CS at MIT either.
Actually, let me retract that. We do get B students who ask about CS or engineering (or business) at colleges with very low acceptance rates.
My point is that there are really no such things as objectively “easy” or “difficult” majors. Different people have different talents and at different levels. Popular majors attract more students whose talents do not match the major.
Again, very few students major in English unless they have the passion for the field, and this generally includes the required talents for doing well in these fields. On the other hand, the majority of the students who choose popular majors like CS or business are doing so because of the money making potential and/or prestige of these fields. Some of these may not have a huge passion for the field, but have the required talents.
Of course, in many cases, classes are made artificially difficult or easy, but that is often determined, by top-down pressures from administrators who want to see higher retention of who are bowing to pressure from entitled parents.
On reflection, I will have to agree with you, since a good amount of the grade inflation does have to do with pressures on the administrations, which are then shifted to the faculty. that is why it is seen more in colleges that either have very wealthy and powerful parents of students, or which have serious retention issues for students.
However, that is not why some majors have higher GPAs than others. There are many reasons for that, including what I wrote about above. What is also true is that a person cannot use teh average GPA of a major as an indicator of how “difficult” it is.
Something else that confounds the use of college data for this is the fact that some topics are taught better in high school than others. In my experience, and this is true for many other people with whom I have spoken, there are far more good English teachers in high school than there are good math teachers. On average, I think that more English majors have been prepared well for their major than Engineering/CS majors.
Of course, what is taught in high school also matter. Some topics have curricula which better prepare students for the major than others. Nothing that students learn in high school, really prepares them for philosophy. If math was taught better, that would help, but it’s not.