What is the ultimate 21st Century degree?

noimagination
Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:52:28 +0000

You have a very narrow view of what is accomplished during a humanities education, I’m sure that the student that read those “Five Russian Novels”, assuming they were in, say, a Russian Studies course, would have more experience with Russian or other Slavic cultures than a physicist who “interacts with foreign students and faculty” - as if a humanities major wouldn’t talk to foreign students anyway.

The more questionable leap is in assuming that academic knowledge of Slavic artistic culture provides experience useful when dealing with individuals of Slavic ancestry.

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.

Citation please. I don’t doubt that your claim is true, but I’d be interested to see the data.

More to the point, I think there is probably strong self-selection bias at work here. Attending med school is not generally the primary stream for graduates in the subjects you name. Students going out of their way to pursue an abnormal course of action probably have strong incentive to select that option and therefore succeed at a higher rate. Just a possibility.