<p>I don’t think it has anything to do with the departments themselves. It’s more the fact that anyone who doesn’t want to work as hard isn’t going to sign up for a differential equations or organic chemistry course. 50% of the student body majors in social sciences… so econ, political science, psychology, etc, are the default non-science majors.</p>
<p>I don’t have much first hand experience with any of those, but I didn’t get the impression that the quality of education was any lower in those areas. There were just more people skipping class in psych 101 and intro to the history of cinema than there were in calc 3. I suspect that you’d see the same thing at any school.</p>
<p>I can say that the students in engineering, math, physics, computer science, etc, were very good, with few exceptions. My philosophy advisor once asked me why engineers were always her best students. My guess is that it’s self selection. If you fall behind in the hard sciences, you don’t have a chance in upper level courses. If you think you might fall behind, you don’t sign up for a major with 27+ required credits. Other fields don’t build up as linearly.</p>
<p>Because of the very small number of people who actually major in physics or computer science, for example, you end up with a situation where there are more tenured faculty than declared majors. This creates some great opportunities for research, and it allows the faculty to teach upper level classes hand picked by the majors each year.</p>
<p>I don’t think this causes the other majors to be weak at all. I had a great experience academically as a philosophy major too. Overall I was impressed by the students at Trinity.</p>