We’ve all heard about the benefits of being a well-rounded student, but what are the most well-rounded colleges? What colleges have good programs in STEM, fine arts, business/economics, etc. AND make it easy to double major across domains or at least take various classes in different fields?
Brown, Amherst, Hamilton and Smith would meet this criterion most closely. Grinnell would as well, though their curriculum would be somewhat narrower than those at the aforementioned schools, so it might not meet your additional criteria. Amherst and Hamilton would offer little directly in engineering (except “pre-engineering” type courses), so this could be a potential limitation for these two colleges. (Business as a major may not commonly be found at top-level schools, so this criterion, if maintained as distinct from the study of economics, could elimate a lot of otherwise attractive options.)
Northwestern
Liberal arts colleges tend to have more double majors than large universities. This is because:
(1) LACs generally offer BA programs, which have fewer course requirements than BS programs;
(2) LACs don’t usually have multiple Schools (i.e. School of Engineering, School of Business, School of Arts & Sciences) with different bureaucracies and requirements;
(3) LACs are smaller, and tend to have more departmental and institutional flexibility.
So at a LAC like Williams, for example, [over 40%](Fast Facts About Williams – Office of Communications) of the students graduate with double majors.
The downside is that LACs don’t offer as broad a range of courses as larger universities; for example, they typically don’t have business or engineering. If you want a LAC with that kind of breadth, take a look at Bucknell.
Another school to consider might be Lehigh, which is a small university (not a LAC) noted for interdisciplinary degree programs. These include Computer Science & Business, Integrated Business & Engineering, and Integrated Engineering, Arts, and Sciences.
Larger research universities typically have the strongest programs across the board although they vary in how easy/ difficult it is for non majors to take said courses. I know at my school, the University of Oklahoma, it is a trivial matter for students to sign up for introductory classes in almost every college at the university, but this is not the case at say, UC Berkeley which has competitive admission for a large number of programs.
Ease of double majoring means that:
a. The majors at the school in question have just the minimum number of course requirements for the major to be considered adequate (in terms of what people expect the major to include).
b. The general education requirements are minimal to none.
William & Mary
A more common way to describe “Well-Rounded Universities”, are “comprehensive” and that usually means they offer programs of study in a large number of fields. Typically the most comprehensive universities are large research universities that offer 100+ degree programs (and have several colleges, such as the college of engineering, business, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Journalism…etc.).
However, being comprehensive doesn’t always means it’s easier (or harder) to dual major at that school. That usually has more to do with school policy on requirements to earn a 2nd major. At UF for example, you have separate requirements for Double Majors, Dual Degree or Second Majors.
Ditto Northwestern. The science and fine arts programs are all world class. Double Majoring is strongly encouraged there. Also, as a general rule of thumb, any school on the quarter system should be easier to double major.
Michigan, Berkeley, Texas, Cornell, Notre Dame, and USC are top schools that cover the gamut of liberal arts, business, and engineering fields well (although I don’t know how easy it is to double major across these areas at any of them). They also have more-or-less strong D1 sports programs and are large enough to support a wide variety of other EC interests.
Stanford seems to do an excellent job of exposing top students to engineering, entrepreneurship, and the liberal arts. It has top programs in many diverse fields. Apparently it also has educated more Olympic medalists than any other college besides the much larger USC.
Univ of Rochester comes to mind
From the responses, you should be able to see the general issues:
- Liberal arts colleges typically make it easy to double-major, but they don't necessarily have the breadth. You can't double-major in English and Business, for example, because they don't have a School of Business. You can only double-major in traditional Arts & Sciences disciplines -- which would include Economics, but not Business. It's common for LAC students to double-major in, say, STEM/Econ or Humanities/Econ; however, a BA in Economics is a more theoretical major than, say, a BS in Business or Finance.
- Large universities definitely have the breadth, but they don't necessarily make it easy to double-major. You can't double-major in English and Business, for example, because the School of Arts & Sciences and the School of Business have different, non-overlapping admission and graduation requirements, the two schools make no effort to coordinate, and it is unlikely that you will get all of the classes needed to complete all of the requirements for both majors in four years.
My guess is that the most optimal combination of breadth and flexibility for double-majoring would most likely be found at larger, more comprehensive LACs (e.g. Bucknell) or at smaller, teaching-oriented universities (e.g. Lehigh).
Exception: LACs or small universities with a mandatory senior thesis requirement, like Princeton or Reed. The senior thesis requirement pretty much kills the possibility of double-majoring, because it is not realistic to write two theses in your senior year.
^ Just to add to the above, many top research universities (eg. Northwestern) or LACs (Willams, Amherst, Davidson) send plenty of kids to top banks and consulting firms without having an undergraduate business school. Many of these kids double major in Econ or Math combined with something totally different.
As an opinion, for a school to be considered well-round, it should offer a strong geosciences department. Potential majors would of course require this, but for non-majors, geosciences study can be considered foundational to an understanding of the natural world. An astronomy minor (at least)/astronomical observatory would be nice to see as well.
^ well-rounded.
@Larkin29 Penn is very well-rounded and known for its focus on interdisciplinary education. As an undergraduate you can very easily do a double major, do interdisciplinary research and take classes in many Penn schools other than your home school, including some grad schools.
For a comprehensive curriculum, hundreds of schools may be suitable. Messiah College (PA), which offers programs in business, nursing, education and engineering, would be one example.
For a well-rounded school in the way that may be implied in the original post, look for a college at which 1) general academic excellence seems apparent by objective criteria, 2) no single major selection seems to predominate (as might be reflected by percentage representation in the teens or higher), 3) the overall distribution of major selections balances roughly evenly across the three major academic areas of sciences and math, humanities and fine arts and the social sciences and 4) the curriculum has not been separated by internal divisions, which might obviate the benefits of the aforementioned attributes. Schools with these characteristics in combination may be fairly rare.
Brandeis, Muhlenberg, Skidmore