What is the ultimate 21st Century degree?

b_r_um
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:35:54 +0000

Students wouldn’t necessarily only learn about artistic culture of course; and understanding of the history of the region, and the language, would provide a huge benefit.



The silliest questions I have heard about my home country came from students who had studied its art and history. If I tried to study US culture by studying US movies, I would come to the conclusion that most criminals are black and that everyone looks like a super model. Obviously that’s not what reality looks like.



As to the portion about Science majors outperforming humanities majors on the LSAT, that is true, if you ignore the fact that the difference is about one point, and the second spot is held by students of Philosophy or Theology.

Interestingly enough, the mode of inquiry in philosophy is very close to that of mathematics. The gap between sciences and humanities becomes much wider when you look at less rigorous humanities. Math and physics are about 4 points ahead of history and English, and 7 points ahead of general liberal arts. 7 points is an entire standard deviation!



You would also have to ignore the fact that Humanities majors, especially classics, religion, philosophy, even English, regularly outperform hard science majors on the MCAT and the GRE, and that the majors with the highest acceptance rates to medical schools are Classics, Economics, History, Political Science, Religion, and English, in that order, with chemistry coming in seventh.

When you look at nationwide data - instead of just the graduates of Creighton University - math and physical science majors outperform humanities majors on the MCAT. Here’s data from the AAMC: http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table18-facts09mcatgpabymaj1-web.pdf

It’s similar for the GRE. Students aspiring to go into science fields outperform students aspiring to go into humanities fields. I admit that one has to be very careful with these numbers. It seems to be much easier to get a high score on the quantitative section than on the verbal section, which gives an advantage to quantitative majors. On the other hand, the verbal scores of science majors are skewed by a huge percentage of foreign test takers. (I don’t know how many international students there are in the humanities, but many science+engineering graduate programs enroll more than 50% foreign students.)

[GRE Scores for Arts and Humanities - Average GRE Scores for Arts and Humanities Majors](Average GRE Scores for Top Public Universities)
[GRE Scores for Physical Sciences - Average GRE Scores for Physical Sciences](Average GRE Scores for Top Public Universities)