Wait a second... I thought EVERY college student had to take at least one hard science? I personally took physics AND chemistry even though I wasn’t going those tracks. MOST ungrads I knew took Biology 101 which was amusing, because those lecture halls were ridiculous.
We require our healthcare management majors to take Biology 101 and Anatomy I and II, so they will have some idea of what healthcare professionals do.
Things haven’t been like that for a while.
My kid is currenty working on a bio-chem major. Very tough compared to the kids skating through on sports medicine and the like. The difference between the final exams for the two groups is astounding.
Indeed. I went to a liberal arts college in the 90’s, and everyone had to enroll in at least 1-2 courses across every discipline. So even we compsci majors had to take an “FPA” (fine/performing arts) class, the art majors had to come to our side and do a “T” (Technology) course, and so on. Everyone had to pick an “I” (Integrated) , which were special courses comprised of 2 or more disciplines, and they has to be outside of your major. So there was the “History of Art” (social science + art), “Personal Mythology” (psych + philosophy), and so on.
I was a C biology student in high-school and yet I am amazed at how much science I seem to know compared to most others I encounter.
I always joked about how us Bio majors had the worst of it.
We had to take both kinds of Chemistry because you can’t understand Bio without Chem. But of course you can’t understand Chem without Physics so you have to take that,
We had to get multiple semesters of Physics and Chem with labs “out of the way” before we could even start on a bio major.
I can see avoiding the hard sciences by taking a course load heavy on mathematics, macro and micro economics, finance, accounting etc. I don’t mean some of those MBA or Business degrees that are all theory and management....I mean some serious mathematically based knowledge of finance and economics.
Hold on, Turbo. It WAS that way until the students began questioning the RELEVANCE of distributional requirements. A lot of universities eliminated their distributional requirements often stating that the students were in the best position to determine what courses were RELEVANT to their to their personalized field of study. The result was that many students loaded up on meaningless but perhaps entertaining courses like “Lady Gaga—Her Contribution to Art in the 21st Century”. The result is we have people who have degrees that, sadly, are worth neither the paper one which they are printed nor the tuition paid.
Even 20 years ago most colleges offered classes like ‘Math and Science for Journalism Majors’. Which was a one semester class counting for both their math and science requirements. In the college I went to it was taught by a junior or senior undergrad in one of the hard sciences or math.
This is why liberal arts majors are party majors. Few of their classes are challenging.