[callahad]

There's a flaw in assuming that an undergraduate liberal arts education is terminal. For instance, "between 1986 and 1995, more people earning PhD degrees in the earth sciences graduated from Carleton (50) than any other four-year college."

And that's from a tiny liberal arts school with a total population of ~2,000 students.

[celoyd]

There’s a lot of fuzziness about what “liberal arts” actually means. To me it means something like a general education including both sciences and the humanities. In this sense there’s nothing the least surprising about getting a liberal arts education and a degree in the earth sciences. But I see it in a lot of contexts where it seems to mean fluffy humanities and only fluffy humanities.