<p>I kind of don’t understand it either. The courses for econ. majors tend to be significantly easier and require less of a workload. Not to mention, now-a-days, the math in many econ. courses is more or less watered down (think B-calc. what a joke!). Many of those classes are so lame/easy that the student will be exposed to the material, but will certainly not retain enough to be exactly competent when entering the workplace. A chem. major supplemented with a stats. class or some key business pre-reqs on the side should be enough. As for bio, some schools require exposure to data and statistical analysis. Like, for example, we have a life sciences calculus series that integrates normal calc., linear algebra, differential equations, and a 1/2 semester of intense stats. Not to mention, if done right, the bio major will have courses that involve case studies or data analysis (we have several teachers employing this approach). They could at least make business and econ. majors take the calc. based statistics series (which I hear is pretty tough). It’s amazing that we have a top undergrad. business school, and even though the school has grade distribution requirements, their GPAs somehow come out higher than the college. Let’s say it like this, some of those classes are so easy that a 96 will not warrant a solid A(A- instead) even though 35-45% of students can be awarded an A grade (and like 15% an A). </p>
<p>Hah. You would be surprised about what students don’t know after taking all of those econ. and business classes. Perhaps business classes are more practical, hopefully. A chem. degree may be worthless to businesses (oh, wait, one can go into pharmacology/pharmaceuticals), but certainly not to academia, medicine, or professional schools. You’ll notice the amount of econ. majors that supplement their major with a major meaning that even they are skeptical. </p>
<p>And then you have to explain the amount of potential scientists hitting wallstreet and finance of various sorts (I was told that an abnormal amount of MIT students for example, choose this path).</p>