Thanks!

[sakky]

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And yep, you’re pretty much boned if you try to transfer out with even marginal grades - it doesn’t help that you’d have almost no academic record because of the P/F system. Also dead on about the offered majors. Even if we offered more HSS degrees, they’d be worthless in terms of continuing one’s education, so no one would bother to earn them.

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<p>Well, I wonder if that’s really true. I would point to the example of the Sloan School of Management, which I am increasingly convinced is one of MIT’s greatest gems. Sloan didn’t even offer its current undergrad program in management science until 1984 (before then, the Sloan undergrad program was ‘Engineering Administration’ or similar proto-iterations). Heck, the Sloan School itself didn’t exist until 1952 (before then, it was part of the Economics department). Nowadays, Sloan management science is the 4th most popular undergrad major at MIT. </p>

<p>I could have told the same story about the MIT Department of Economics, or the Department Political Science - which didn’t even become an independent department until 1965 but is now regarded as a top 10-15 polisci department - but I think the Sloan School is the most prominent example. The point is, if MIT has managed to build some strong social science undergrad majors in a relatively short period of time, surely Caltech can do the same. After all, Caltech has plenty of money - heck it even has a larger endowment per student than MIT does - so I’m pretty sure that Caltech could afford this.</p>