[alephnerd]

That doesn't preclude minoring or double majoring - which is what plenty of my peers who were also STEM majors often did (as did I)

Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.

[WalterBright]

At Caltech, the usual was to double major with one to make money, the other for fun. The fun one was usually Astronomy, where it was well known there were no prospects for employment.

In my case the problem was there were too many fascinating engineering classes to take. I tried to pick out ones that would be of maximum benefit to my chosen career.

[alephnerd]

Tbf, Caltech is also a much more self selecting student base.

Plenty of my MIT friends explicitly chose MIT over Caltech because they wanted a technical education but also the freedom to deep dive in English or Political Science as well (Caltech has great faculty in the HSS, but class choice was unsurprisingly limited).

That said, based on your account age, I think you studied in the 1980s to early 2000s back when programs were much less interdisciplinary. It's much easier to double major with a STEM and humanities major from the 2010s to present versus before.

[WalterBright]

I graduated before 1980. A degree requirement was taking some liberal arts courses. I decided on economics. The prof taught that free markets were bad and marxism was good. That left(!) a bad taste wrt liberal arts. He went on to garner many accolades for his work.

I fulfilled the rest of the liberal arts requirement with foreign language classes and business accounting classes. I was not interested in taking political classes.

Fortunately, Newtonian Mechanics was free of politics. If your rocket doesn't fly, you cannot pretend it did.

[alephnerd]

Yeah I can see why that left a bad taste.

[vixen99]

Some people say it nevertheless. Oscar Kambona, a Cabinet Minister in President Nyerere's Tanzanian Government tells how he met Mao in China. Prior to the meeting he spoke to some surgeons repairing a fractured leg. Were they satisfied the operation had been a success? "Yes", they said, "because we read Chairman Mao's Little Red Book before the operation. You can achieve anything if you follow a leader".