Re the University of Chicago core, it’s completely wrong to say that it’s been watered down to a bunch of distributional requirements. The non-science/math portion of the core offers students a limited number of options, but for the critical humanities and social science courses the different options have a huge overlap in the texts they study. The result is that everyone has studied the same source material, but with somewhat different foci. For science and math, however, it’s true that the Chicago core is essentially a distributional requirement. There’s really no way around that in a world where entering students arrive with very different needs and competency levels in math and lab sciences. It’s also true that non-science/math students who don’t want to take rigorous science and math courses can take very “lite” courses to meet their science and math requirements. On the other hand, Chicago remains a really math-y place, and it’s pretty hard – not impossible, but unusual – to major in any social science subject there without at least some post-calculus math.
I agree that MIT ought to be attractive to students with an interest in social sciences, or at least some of them (economics, psychology, political science). Maybe the issue is fear of the difficulty of the MIT core, maybe the issue is not wanting to go to a place where they may be seen as second-class citizens, or maybe the issue is the admissions staff instinctively prefers engineers.
This is interesting. So MIT has amazing social science/humanities depts and employs world-class social science profs , but have few kids taking these classes beyond Core?
Well, really the issue is that when students and people think of MIT, they don’t think, “I’m going to be a (insert non-STEM major here), so I want to go to MIT.”
In fact, when a student or graduate says, “I go/went to MIT,” doesn’t everyone assume that this person is/was a STEM major?
Nothing specific to STEM at all. You’re proving my point because you are projecting on MIT. If MIT didn’t care about the social sciences, why did they build up some of the best departments/schools in the world in econ, business, and poli sci?
And the lemmings are folks who don’t consider MIT for social science/business.
@mom2collegekids, indeed. Though social sciences only, not humanities. But the problem is that letting lay opinion guide your decision-making seems rather misguided. It’s as if someone didn’t consider UChicago for science because they only know it for econ or didn’t consider Northwestern for engineering because they only know it for theatre and journalism. People who hire and grad schools know about Sloan, MIT econ, poli sci, etc.
It could be a supply side issue as well with the admins weeding out applicants who don’t have a strong STEM focus. World class researchers generally don’t want to teach undergrads, and the reason many may want to be at MIT is that they generally don’t have to.
Thread may be going in circles. MIT may have other strong departments, but it’s not ‘projecting’ to say its strength as a tech school is what attracts stem students. So the vast majority of grads are in stem.
And it’s not going to be some special hook to tell their adcoms, “I always wanted to major in history.”
OTOH, being rounded, having an interest in more than your one stem topic can be an interesting note. The fact they offer breadth doesn’t mean MIT should expect a high number of actual humanities majors.
“A feature not a bug,” as many, many stem folks do have broad and deep interests outside their one primary academic field.
One of the major advantages of MIT is that the humanities are so strong. MIT students must fulfill HASS (humanities) requirements, so it’s great that the kids have the opportunity to learn from such excellent humanities professors.
It’s also great that MIT is so strong in business and economics. The combination of engineering (or science, math, …) with business/economics can be very powerful if one starts a career in traditional engineering within a large corporation, but later transitions to management in that company – or perhaps better yet, breaks off and starts up a new company. Anyway, that’s what I tell my kid, who is headed to MIT this fall.
"It’s as if someone didn’t consider UChicago for science because they only know it for econ or didn’t consider Northwestern for engineering because they only know it for theatre and journalism. "
UChicago and Northwestern (and most of the other schools at that level) are far more “well rounded” (albeit in different ways) than MIT. Anyway, I don’t get the lemmings concept at all. Some people who want to be STEM people want to be at an exclusively-or-mostly STEM place. Others want to be part of a place that has widely varying offerings and classmates studying all different things. It’s neither good nor bad to have those preferences; they are just personal preferences.
It is one thing to study A (knowing that few of your fellow students are studying it) when your fellow classmates are studying B, C, D, E, F … Z. It’s quite another to be one of the few students of A when everyone around you is studying only B and the university is built around the entire field of B. Very few people want to do that. That doesn’t make people “lemmings” for preferring the first scenario to the second.
Sorry @PurpleTitan , I don’t believe I’m projecting. I think I am reflecting.
I still don’t get what you mean by lemmings, but I am officially giving up trying. Apparently every single student in the entire country who is interested in soc science or business but does not apply to MIT is a lemming?
@Pizzagirl, Northwestern is more well-rounded than MIT but UChicago actually isn’t. UChicago offers 56 majors with no business or engineering school while MIT offers 72 majors including a business school and engineering.
Yet people seem insistent on pigeon-holing MIT as only a STEM school when it has strengths in about as many areas as UChicago does.
HASS = Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. I don’t see your point @JHS . Is it that I didn’t spell out that HASS includes more than just humanities? If so, I apologize. I don’t see the irony.
I’m sorry for the conflation. Point taken. But I believe that HASS is indeed peripheral to MIT’s main focus. I really don’t think that anyone here would dispute that. As I said though, it’s great that MIT students are exposed to such excellent professors and classes outside of STEM.
“Ironic in the context of this thread. What do you think HASS stands for? (Hint: the “SS” part pops up in many of these posts.)”
There are ways to make your point without being snarky. Please try.
I think another issue might also be the kind of students you would encounter if you decided to major in humanities or social sciences at MIT. Since students learn as much from their class mates as their professor through class discussions and group work, it’s not enough to have small classes, you have to attract a vibrant group of students interested in a particular major to the school for it to make sense for other students to major in that field at that school.
I think MIT just may not be doing that for the humanities or social sciences although they are trying hard I think. When I attended their info session the speaker spent a lot of time explaining why a prospective student should pick MIT for humanities related majors. It’s not just the quality of the professor that matters though and if there isn’t a critical mass of interesting students on campus majoring in the humanities, it may indeed make sense for a student to go somewhere else and I think that is what the numbers might be showing
“Northwestern is more well-rounded than MIT but UChicago actually isn’t. UChicago offers 56 majors with no business or engineering school while MIT offers 72 majors including a business school and engineering.”
UChicago offers a wider DIVERSITY of majors than MIT does, though. (And yeah, I could argue NU offers even wider with engineering, music, journalism, etc but I really don’t like getting into flame wars between the two, as they are both great but just different.)
I still don’t see the point here. I would not want to be a non-STEM person in a PREDOMINANTLY STEM school like MIT. That is in no way comparable to being non-STEM at a NU or U of Chicago where you’ll have plenty of company.
MIT’s mission, focus, everything is explicitly built around technology. They even have it in the name - there’s your clue. It’s more akin to a Caltech (or to a Berklee or Juilliard for music) than it is a “regular” university with equal offerings all around.
…seems to me the two schools most argued about on CC are Chi and MIT. :-S
We’ve got a friend who left a top ten to teach humanities at MIT. Good salary, well funded research, flexible schedule, quality students, etc. But, “not the same” as this person’s prior experience.
As an MIT graduate, I try to encourage people to apply even if they are considering social studies or humanities majors (not that I interact with many high schoolers apart from those already applying in the first place). Even in subjects where MIT is not ranked highly, there are a lot of strong faculty. And what’s great about MIT is that because so few people take these subjects, you can get a lot of personal attention that you might not get at schools more “known” for social studies and humanities subjects. I have friends who were not even creative writing minors who were on a first name basis with Junot Diaz.
I don’t think the issue is specific to MIT though, I know people that have expressed confusion as to why someone would go to WUSTL and not be pre-med, for example.
