See the "humanities is easy" comment below. Too many STEM-Lords in HN a lot of the time sadly. It's a very immature view but a sadly common one in much of tech.
The reality is in the middle - majoring in a humanities subject can still work out just fine, but you have be a lot more careful about what you do in college and what skills you develop. This scares the shit out of the STEM folks, as their idea of "be careful about what they do in college" mostly appears to be "Oh, so I need to do an okay internship or two over the summer." The humanities kids have to do a lot more research and a lot more gumshoeing to figure out where they're going to go after they graduate.
Unfortunately, most kids aren't like that. They're going to college because Mommy and Daddy told them to do so, and they're majoring in History because it "sounded cool," not because it was their passion or because they decided that a History degree was the correct decision for achieving their goals in life. If you expect this apathetic kid to go out and look for himself to figure out exactly how his History degree can get him a job, you've got another thing coming. That's where we get the "barista with a master's degree" stereotype.
Basically, if your chosen major doesn't have a well-defined career path, (This includes biology, incidentally) you need to work harder and be even more proactive in figuring out where your next move is going to be. This bodes poorly for the average immature 19-year-old who has absolutely no idea what he's going to be doing.
I think this slippery-slope outcome of this is that children are funneled into early tutoring, academic kindergartens, etc. It seems absurd to do everything in life just to optimize for profit. Bye bye holidays???
It actually includes most of the pure natural sciences, and mathematics. Engineering is the track with the careers.
Personally, I like pure computer science and CS academia, but most of the undergrads taking CS degrees are trying to learn software engineering, and will object loudly if asked to take, for instance, type theory, topology, computability and automata theory, statistical learning theory (ML courses have massive drop rates), computational complexity, Kolmogorov complexity theory, how to build an operating system, compilers and optimization, abstract interpretation for static analysis, mathematical logic, etc.
That wasn't true in the 90s. The guidance counselors still pretended it was, in the 90s.
This is why it is common for someone to give up on Computer Science / Math / Physics / Chemistry / Engineering, but go on to graduate in History or English or Journalism.
Does anyone know a single person who tried and tried, but just couldn't manage a History degree, so they had to take the easy route and ended up majoring in Physics???? HA!
edit: Also what's your take on why Freshmen have diverged from high-school students in recent years? What changed?
I majored in comp. sci. minored in phil. I spent the majority of my time working through the technical classes, I kind of mailed it in for the philosophy classes, and got B's. I would have liked to spend more time 'trying' in the philosophy classes, but I really just didn't have it to spend. Some of them were really quite interesting.
I guess this doesn't really answer your question, because I know people got A's in the classes I got B's in, but it might provide perspective into why an engineering major didn't ace all their 400 level phil. classes.
At many engineering schools, the humanities are a joke.
They are often filled with engineering dropouts and students who couldn't get accepted into a more prestigious liberal-arts school.
Mix in the fact that the engineering schools often have a "wash out" course at the 100 level, while the liberal arts fields tend to not have this, and what you get is STEM students who take a few 100 level humanities classes, see nothing as rigorous as their 100 level engineering classes, and you get this perception.
I also can't stress enough that the rigor of any department is directly related to the quality of students the department attracts. No college will allow a department to fail 90% of the students (impacted course tracks notwitstanding) so poor students leads to low standards.
I went to Purdue, but have observed similar trends at other large engineering schools. I minored in philosophy, and anyone who tool philosophy at a liberal-arts school would likely not believe how low the standard for a B in the classes there was.
Even comparing stories with Indiana University students, (also a state school, in the same state, but not an engineering school) the classes were a joke.
I avoided doubling up in a humanities precisely because the course load seemed like it would be too much. Give me a differential equation or Lie algebra any day. Engaging human beings in complex arguments is exhausting. Mathematics studies concepts simple enough to compress to a few pages of symbols. The difference is, I am as in love with mathematics as I am with English, or history, or philosophy. I can imagine manifold ways for a person to be duped into a STEM program at first (most of them being kin to the threat of economic uncertainty without a highly paid professional job) only to abandon it when they could not engage with the work enough to do it well.
What might look to you like "giving up" often more closely resembles "finding one's strengths". Not everyone is good at STEM, true, but then again that's not the problem with your attitude. It's the implication that having an aptitude outside of STEM entails some kind of intellectual deficit.
Where in the hell did you go to school? I've never heard of science teaching being designed to make the subject easy.