On another thread I was advised to ask which schools DON’T have adequate programs in these areas rather than which do, and so I decided to start a thread on the matter. One school in particular I’m wondering about is Carnegie Mellon. So, which schools are primarily focused on Tech/ STEM areas and would not be a good fit for those looking for a degree in the Humanities/ Social Sciences field? TIA!
Would schools like MIT that have mostly STEM major students but do have large H/SS departments and the ability to major in various H/SS subjects be acceptable to you, or would they be on the list you want to make from this thread?
Harvey Mudd
CalTech
Rose-Hulman
Olin
RPI
MIT would not be somewhere I’d want to go, but due more to the core curriculum with tons of mandatory STEM classes. The prevalence of STEM students would be a factor though.
Cal Tech and Georgia Tech immediately come to mind.
By the way, you mention CMU as being pure STEM but actually it has one of the best Drama schools in the country (which would fall under humanities).
CMU also has an undergraduate degree in Decision Sciences which falls in the social sciences. Yes, it has a very strong theater and design school.
By the way, I think you may have misinterpreted the advice given to you by another member of the CC community. The essential point was that the overwhelming majority of elite/ prestigious schools have robust programs in most major humanities and social sciences disciplines. This makes sense given that these are among the most popular fields in terms of raw numbers of majors, so it is in a school’s best interest to devote substantial resources to them.
Realistically, I doubt that the schools where it is not advisable to be a student of the humanities or social sciences would even be on your radar. Students interested in say, art history, are about as likely to consider Cal Tech as a student interested in electrical engineering is to consider Sarah Lawrence College.
If economics is of interest, you may want to downgrade schools where the economics major and intermediate economics courses do not require calculus. Examples include Penn State and Florida State.
By the way, I think the suggestion by that poster on the other topic was essentially a rhetorical proposition with the intent to emphasize the wide range of schools which in their opinion are strong in H/SS. However, this new topic could prove informative to you in ways that cannot be anticipated.
Webb Institute
Babson
Regarding CMU, it offers many H/SS majors:
http://coursecatalog.web.cmu.edu/degreesoffered/
However, it does not appear to have a traditional political science major, although there is political science content in other majors, such as international relations and politics (described at http://coursecatalog.web.cmu.edu/dietrichcollegeofhumanitiesandsocialsciences/instituteforpoliticsandstrategy/ ).