History Major at Penn?

45_Percenter
Thu, 03 Aug 2017 17:11:26 +0000

@Cue7 I’m not sure what you mean by “non-bankable” majors, but I think you’re characterization of Penn’s numbers in those majors as being a little low is a bit misleading and erroneous. By my quick review, the largest major in the College is Economics with 141 majors. I’m not sure how “bankable” Econ is, but I have no doubt that it’s one of the most popular majors at most top schools, as you pointed out with Princeton. Beyond that, I think it’s inaccurate to characterize the next most popular majors in the College as “bankable,” or as more popular at Penn’s College than at most other liberal arts schools. Also, your analysis fails to take into account the popularity of interdisciplinary majors in the College, which by definition touch on several traditional liberal arts disciplines. Again, based on quick review, I found the most popular majors in the College based on the Class of 2016 Career Plans Survey Report to be the following, with number of majors in parentheses:

Econ (141)
Biology (111)
Biological Basis of Behavior (108)
Political Science (91)
Psychology (62)
English (58)
Health and Societies (58)
Communications (57)
Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (55)
International Relations (54)
History (47)
Biochemistry (33)
Cognitive Science (32)
Math (26)
Computer Science (22)

Those majors account for 955 of the Class of 2016 respondents, and if we extrapolate from the 79% response rate, we can assume that about 1,210 out of the 1,600 members of the Class of 2016–or about 75% of the class–majored in those 15 areas. And again, taking into account that the popular interdisciplinary majors–BBB, Health and Societies, Communications, PPE, IR, and Cog Sci–span several traditional liberal arts departments such as biology, psychology, history, political science, philosophy, economics, sociology, anthropology, math, etc., I’m fairly confident that you’d find that similar proportions of liberal arts undergrads at other top schools tend to major in those and similar fields. Sure, one can point to individual examples of, e.g., 30 Anthro majors at Princeton vs. 20 at Penn, but I suspect that at most comparable schools–other Ivies, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, and some school on the south side of Chicago whose name I forget ;)–you’d find a similar mix of majors (and component majors in the case of Penn’s interdisciplinary majors) among the most popular majors chosen by 75% of the liberal arts students.