Yeah, I was an English Lit major, but I had to take at least one hard science class (Physics) and one soft science class (Psychology) to get my degree.
My question was for @Tabco
Mine didn’t. The closest I came to humanities was a course on engineering cultures around the world and there were three of them I had to take but they designed as blow off classes. Instead of litatuture we has writing intensive course like labs where longer papers were required to be turned in. To the best of my knowledge there were no language courses offered at my college. I also didn’t get credit for my two 5s on the ap English because my school didn’t have anything comparable.
This was at a top level public engineering school. My major was a top 5 in the world program.
The university has what they call a baccalaureate core (bacc core) that includes the typical general education requirements (humanities, literature, etc). All students must complete it. Completing all of these might consume, say, 20% of the credit hours needed for graduation. The civil engineering degree program consumes the remaining 80%.
Some degree programs don’t, so those students can take whatever they want to hit that credit requirement.
I’ve said it on this board before, for me a four year college degree proves one thing that an employer is interested in. That you can make a commitment to finish something you started, much like completing a stint in the armed forces. It’s something you can point to for the rest of you life as an achievement and it opens doors that would otherwise be immediately closed to you.
And its a good time to party and get laid while you are still young. Sure its not a golden ticket but getting a degree and learning something about yourself is of value.
Can’t I answer it, too?
That’s how ours worked; everyone had to take something like 12 hours of non-scientific courses, beyond the specific required courses (basic English composition, technical writing, 6 hours of history and six hours of political science), for a total of 30 hours.
I recall having taken classical archaeology, Soviet History, intro psychology, and organizational psychology as my humanities electives.
This was in the College of Engineering at a major land/sea/space grant state research university (Texas A&M), although I started college 30 years ago.
I don’t know. I earned a BS in Civil Engineering and our program had a bunch of options for non-engineering electives. I suppose at the end of the day it was probably a bit of a waste taking a bunch of classes in structural engineering and soil mechanics and whatnot that I mostly never used in the real world.