<p>I am taking a very broad sampling of courses for my freshman year, and have not met a single person who takes the purported “fuzzy vs. techie” thing seriously. It’s obviously reductive in the extreme, and antithetical to Stanford’s desire to offer innovative interdisciplinary majors and the widest array possible of interesting courses. If anyone is susceptible to thinking about undergraduate education in such limited, binary terms, maybe it is a response to media-inflated fears about the job market, perhaps exacerbated by parental/cultural pressures to only consider majors with above-average earnings prospects. Everyone I know, however, understands that the ability to effectively communicate complex ideas, both orally and in writing, is hugely valued in every area of the marketplace, and thus they value their training in the humanities as well as the sciences.</p>