[bane]

"The first is that you're confusing the quality of your (from the sound of it, lower division) undergraduate English program with the quality of English as a discipline. The study of literature, in English or any other language, is, at its core, philosophical."

I honestly hope that you can illuminate me -- the corpus of books available in the language are the same for both you an I. Before school, I toyed around with being an English major and a survey of programs at the schools I was interested in didn't really seem to offer course loads that would have provided me with any particular insight except maybe an extended survey of Milton's work.

Years later, based on my anecdotal experience, I find it obvious that my school mates who went on to major in liberal arts can't find work that pays as well as engineering. Any decent engineer could, more or less, do their jobs. Supply far outstrips demand and the training to become an Engineer requires a superset of the skills required to graduate with a B.A. in English.

Again, based on my anecdotal and singular experience, suppose a massive nuke went off in the atmosphere and the EMP wiped out all electrical equipment on the planet. I have no doubt that any competent engineer that went through a school with a reasonably well rounded curriculum would find work as a copywriter for some periodical someplace. A week or two to the learn the style and content the editor wants and off you go. It literally isn't rocket science. If they can effectively communicate in writing, they can participate at a reasonably high level in English as a discipline. The opposite is not true. Very few English majors could "fall" into an engineering job and be up and running in a couple of weeks. Engineering is simply harder and sticking it to a B.S. in <insert Engineering discipline> requires the student to almost learn a superset of the skills needed to get a B.A. in <insert English discipline>.

A spot check of programs at highly ranked liberal arts schools (I'm avoiding well known engineering schools on purpose here) shows coursework necessary for a B.A. in English Lit involves classes in "American Lit: Civil War to Present", "Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton", "Myth, Symbol and Allusion in Literature" (yes, actual title), "British Literature 1785 to Present", "Latin American Literature (In Translation)", "Film, Media and History" and electives that include "pick a major author (approved by your Faculty Advisor)", "any writing course", "any historical period including modern writing", "Film" (or as I like to call it "watch some movies and write a 5 paragraph essay on what you just watched". In other words, everything that every engineer at my school either had to do, or just did as part of their normal business in other coursework. Not exactly mind-bending stuff.

Here's Amherst College's (I picked them since they are one of the top ranked Liberal Arts schools in the country) actual program https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/english/maj...

"Majoring in English requires the completion of 10 courses offered or approved by the Department. Students are encouraged to explore the Department’s wide range of offerings in literature, film, and culture. Rather than prescribe any particular route through its curriculum, the Department helps its students develop their own interests and questions, which are then recorded in the students' concentration statements."

Yes that's right, 10 whole courses. By way of comparison, I had to do 50% of Amherst's English major for my Engineering degree just as a minimum requirement. Had I stayed on an extra semester I could have knocked off the equivalent of the entire program had my school offered Amherst's program.

You must take One Level I course, Three Level II courses, One Level IV course, and just to make it extra hard, a course addressing pre-1800 material (which usually really means 1500-1800, heaven forbid anybody study Beowulf). In other words, Intro, three sophomore levels, one proper senior level, and then Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. Not exactly stunning stuff. Brilliantly, I didn't see a single school that had a course about the century of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature that fills bookshelves these days.

Yeah there's some levers the schools can pull to simulate hardness: pile on more readings, assignments in longer essay forms, period lit, translations. But at some point it just becomes busy work. Either you can read a work and write an essay to the assignment or you can't. Figuring out the particular philosophy the instructor wants you to emphasize in their class is an added twist, but it isn't like solving Fermat's last theorem.

By comparison, a random state school I looked at offered a sample schedule for CS students that required an English course per year through their Junior year, A year of Western Civ, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Fine Arts, Something called Global Understanding, Ethics and Law, 16 courses in CS, 4 in Mathematics, 2 in nonrelated engineering such as EE or Civil, 3 semesters of Natural Sciences with labs and must require calculus in the coursework...no Earth/Environmental Sciences for Arts majors, and on top of that, just because CS majors need extra help, a public speaking course and one more humanities course. In the course of a single week you might go from writing a paper on Chaucer, preparing a speech, finishing your chemistry lab, writing an operating system and then back to a paper on Charlemagne followed by homework in Statistics. No wonder people drop out of Engineering disciplines. This kind of curriculum is unbelievable hard.

A specific example a la Amherst, here's Georgia Tech's core CS requirements (this doesn't even include the actual CS courses)

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/future/undergraduates/bscs/corereq

4 Humanities Courses, 4 Social Sciences, 3 Lab Sciences, 5 Maths, 4 other courses, then you can get to the requirements for the major.

So at Georgia tech, just to get to the part of the your degree that you want to take, you have to accomplish 40% of Amherst's English major and a bunch of other stuff.

I agree that there are some elements of advanced literary analysis and writing that my figurative competent engineer might struggle with because of lack of domain knowledge. I certainly couldn't write an extended critique on the use of monologues in English translations of 18th Century Portuguese Enlightenment critiques off the top of my head -- or write an extended Avant Garde piece without falling into obvious uses of Absurdism. But I doubt many undergrad English Lit majors could do the same (I have yet to meet any myself) since the coursework at most schools I looked at didn't touch these subjects at all. I couldn't find a single undergrad English course in my survey of B.A. programs that looked even the slightest bit more daunting than what I had to take for my engineering program. A class on Milton? Pish Posh! A class on North African Poetry? No sweat! Depression Era Authors? Puffincakes!

"The second is that no discipline, not even engineering, is immune to students coasting by doing the bare minimum. Criticizing English because you breezed through a couple of lower division surveys is like criticizing computer science because you breezed through a class on HTML."

It's true, there are different levels of programs. While writing this I ran across a couple questionable programs that probably wouldn't put out a very good engineer. But something to keep in mind is that in most of the engineering programs I'm talking about, the minimum requires means that you got things undoubtedly correct. You got the right answers in the math exams, your programs ran and gave the expected output (and passed the anti-cheat detection software), you built the clocked full-adder correctly and it lit up the right number of lights, you derived Newton's formulas from your lab experiments correctly, or measured the pH of the solution without contaminating the sample. You did all this while also taking all the Reading, Writing, Memorizing and Speaking classes your school demanded of you.

You can't just fill up a paper with meaningless koan vomit, half of it copied from the Internet and get by with a C. If your full adder tells you that 2+3 = purple and your labwork shows that the acceleration of gravity near Earth's surface is 73.9 m/s^2 you get an F.

A grade other than an A or F doesn't mean you successfully argued the point to the professor that your code wasn't meant to run properly as a statement about the absurdity of Women's roles in the Elizabethan Nobility and your teacher just tossed you a bone to get you to stop harassing him on his personal phone number at 3am. It means that it still ran, but failed to provide the expected output for 1 out of a billion possible inputs. It's wrong and buggy, but you don't fail the course because in the real world QA and proper automated tests should catch that anyways.

I remember one course in particular, over the semester my 3 person team wrote a minimal multi-tasking operating system and software stack that included a pretty full user space, a text editor, system level IM and email, an ftp client and server, etc. and got a C+ because we never were able to squash the one bug that didn't allow the system to host itself, even after devoting 2 solid months of 90 hour weeks to it. Oh, and we had to write a paper, build a website, an instruction guide, and about 100 other pages of material for the system. That bug was the only thing that we didn't get perfect marks on and that was all it took, goodbye 4.0.

Back to the main question then, why do people drop out of engineering? Because it's goddamn hard. People will fall into other majors that are simply put easier.