[LetBinding]

Humanities are the hardest discipline to get a PhD in. The leap from a top student in a CS undergrad program to a CS PhD program is not a big one. Most top students in an undergrad CS program can make the intellectual leap necessary to get a PhD in CS.

But for an undergrad in a humanities discipline, making the leap to getting a PhD is a significant intellectual challenge. Reasoning about ideas, communicating them, and validating them, are infinitely harder in humanities than in CS. I would say, in terms of raw critical thinking skills, i.e., not pertaining to a specific discipline-specific problem, humanities PhDs would outperform CS PhDs.

And I say this as someone who is currently in a CS PhD program. I can read other engineering PhD theses and still make sense of it. When I read a humanities theses, I am completely lost.